[Veritas-bu] Ideal Netbackup solution for backing up millions of files

Hi,

It would be extremely helpful if the expert minds in this forum could help me 
with below concerns related to backing up data using Symantec NetBackup.

Background

Our system has a folder containing millions of small files spread across 1000s 
of sub folders running into more than 500GB that needs to be backed up on a 
daily basis. The backup usually starts end of day and is ideally supposed to 
finish before users start accessing the system the following day. However, the 
current backup using Symantec Netbackup takes lot of time and hence, this 
impacts the system performance. I assume this is because of the current backup 
approach used by Symantec is based on file-level backup.

The current backup policy has a monthly full backup, weekly differential backup 
and daily incremental backup. However, the daily backup itself takes more than 
double the desired time. Symantec client version is 7.6.02.The server is a 
physical server having Windows Server 2003. The drive is dedicated to storing 
the files.

I am looking for a solution that would provide the fastest backup in order to 
ensure that backups are completed before users start accessing the system in 
the morning.

1. What is the best approach for backing up millions of small files spread 
across 1000s of folders using Symantec Netbackup?
2. I understand that flash backup feature in Symantec uses block-level backup 
and this would be ideal approach since there are lot of files involved?
3. What are the disadvantages of using Symantec Flashbackup feature?
4. Does installing Symantec SAN client without having fiber channel offer any 
improvement in backup speed? I read on some forums that you should use SAN 
client only if there is fiber channel support.
5. Would moving applications to Virtual Machines hosted on Vmware environment 
provide any improvement.

PS: Backups are not my domain of expertise and hence, I would like to apologize 
in advance if I have mentioned something absurd. Secondly, changing the 
application file structure is not an option :(

Cheers,

Shaheen

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