Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of nigelbeatson
nigelbeatsonFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

asked on

backing up large amounts of data on SBS2003 server.

We have a single HP Windows 2003 (standard) server, running exchange (which is also nearly upto capacity) with a Ultra 320 SCSI card, implemented in a RAID 5 arrangement. It has a dual Intel 3.4GHz processor, and we have 4096 Mb RAM. The storage is 558Gb and of that we currently use 449Gb.

Our problem is that we have a HP Ultrium SCSI tape drive which requires more than 1 tape, which is now taking over a day to backup.

My question is what can we do to improve the speed of backing up this data. We have tried an external USB drive, but again this is taking too long. Is there something qhicker that we can implement, as we would like a backup to take place when the server is not being used, between say 18.00 and 8.00 the following morning - that gives us a 14 hour window.

Not sure about firewire or even USB 3 (our current test is using usb 2). Does anyone have any suggestions?

I know that 500Gb is not that much these days, so what is everyone else using?
Avatar of pjam
pjam
Flag of United States of America image

Avatar of nigelbeatson

ASKER

Do you think it would be suitable for this volume of data? Should I be looking a something totally different? Would this extract the data in the required timeframe?
Quick and cheap, not sure about time frame.  other alternatives will be more costly.
I dumped BE three years ago and never looked back, using DPM 2007 to backup 7 severs. With LTO tape on Saturday to take off site.
 
BE?
Sorry BackupExec
Does the software being used have any bearing on the performance, or is that down to the hardware implemented? Coincidentally, we are using Backup Exec.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Dave Alford
Dave Alford
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Absolutely, that is why I dumped BE.  That and I had three different versions running and three tape drives using different media. And constant failures of the software needing a fix or repair.
 
DPM is at:
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager.aspx
 
if you have an interest.
Further to your coment about the spped of the Ultrium, I originally thought that the problem related to the amount of data being secured. The fact that we now need to span different tapes, causes a problem, in as much as the backup dies not continue without operator intervention.

However, we are also having speed issues with our server, and am wondering whether this has something to do with the overall problem. Processor utilisation is at a minimum, but whenever we click on a utility or program, it can take a couple of minutes before it appears.

I have already raised a seperate incident relating to this, but if you feel the Ultrium is upto the job, it may be the speed issue which is causing the backup problem.

Is there any way around spanning the tapes? The client likes to take a full backup each evening?
we employ retrospect with sata drives swapped out however often the client lets us come on site.  sometimes thats up to twice a week or once a month.  retrospect gets an initial backup and then subsequent backups get only changes.  we haven't tried this with BE as retrospect has a backup method (i forget what it's called) where if a file on serer 1 matches a file on server 2, only the one file is backed up. we're now using 1.5TB drives so you get a lot backup space.  the sats cards we use have esata ports if you don't have the server space to put hard drive swap hardware in your server.

anyway...my 2 cents.
Have you considered changing your backup schedule? Perhaps full backup on weekends and differential on weekdays?
Of course, the 'proper' way to do this is "grandfather, father, son" setup to ensure all data is backed up and available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather-father-son_backup. However, that can get expensive and a nightmare if the tape changer doesn't fully understand the backup regime.
What I do (because I'm not "on site" and,only if I really have to) is take a full backup manually once a month (start the backup first thing in the morning and then change the tape when needed). Then I schedule an incremental backup every night to daily tapes. All I need to do a restore is the last full backup and the last incremental tapes.
This is only good for recovering from a major disaster - it's may not be sufficient if you regularily have to recover data from tape (using shadow copy is good for that - unless it's Exchange or SQL of course)
You've not got a harddisk/RAID issue do you?
thanks to all