Our experience with backing up to disk and then staging to tape has been
OK... You need to understand that it's like running your backups
twice... So if it takes 2 hours to run a group to disk, it will take
another 2 hours to stage those group save-sets to tape. First pass we
wrote the save-sets to an AFTD device, then the second pass staged them
from disk to tape (staging initiated on Windows NW server by scheduled
task), purging the staged save-sets from the disk once all the save-sets
were written to tape. Seems we had a few staging problems where the
staging process would sometimes crash before finishing, leaving some
save-sets on the disk to be manually staged to tape in order to finish
the process.. Some of the save-sets even got lost in this process due to
the issues we experienced.. It did not leave me with a secure feeling
overall... We now simply write everything directly to tape to keep
things easier to manage.

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Paul Steele
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 1:10 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Disk-based backups

We are in the process of upgrading our aging SDLT tape library and
switching to LTO-3. At the same time we're also considering adding
staged disk-based backups to our environment. What are other people's
experience with disk-based backups? Should we consider using Networker's
built-in staging or instead look at a Virtual Tape Library. Is iSCSI
sufficient for staging, or is something faster more appropriate? We have
about 2 TB total disk capacity in our servers, and that will only grow.
Our backups are taking longer and longer so we're interesting in finding
ways to improve things.

 

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.

 


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