Forum Discussion

Dale_Mahalko_LH's avatar
7 years ago

How to backup deduplication storage to external drive?

What is the proper procedure to make a backup of an entire deduplication storage directory to external storage?

In the backup job setup, there is both the raw directory structure of the drive letter and directory name "E:\BackupExecDeduplicationStorageFolder\" .... but there is an additional section under "Shadow copy components" with "Configuration" and "Storage" as possible selections.

So which do I choose to backup? Both of these? Or only the shadow copy components?

The target of the backup is a large external USB drive, with backup compression enabled.

 ,

Also, is this really enough for the dedupe data to be usable if restored in the future, or do I need to be backing up some additional SQL database that is associated with the deduplication disk directory?

  • You can -

    1) stop and disable deduplication services (+ PostgreSQL)
    2) then backup from the drive where dedupe folder exists

    If you need to restore, then folder can be restored and reimported in BE. Also take a backup of BE data folder\bedb.bak and catalogs folder along with HKLM\software\symantec\Backup Exec for windows\PureDisk related keys

    OR

    1) ensure jobs to dedupe are put on hold.no need to stop BE services
    2) Backup the dedupe folder from shadow copy components to the disk storage.
    3) you can backup the bedb.bak and catalog folder. This helps from restore perspective as you have all that you need to ensure you can restore easily from the dedupe storage once it is restored.

    The above 2 methods will backup the deduped size only.

    OR

    Just duplicate the sets from dedupe storage to another storage. But this way the actual (non deduped) size of the backup set will be duplicated on secondary storage.
    • Dale_Mahalko_LH's avatar
      Dale_Mahalko_LH
      Level 4

      As a product feature request, the ability to back up and restore the dedup storage without having to go through all this complex manual preparation, should be directly available within the Backup Exec user interface.

      The entire uncompressed dedupe storage is nearly equal in size to the compressed full tape backups I was previously doing of all of our servers, plus it contains data to recover everything going back four weeks.

      It makes far more sense to be able to regularly and easily backup the entire dedupe storage, after all the other nightly full server backup jobs complete, rather than to export individual jobs out of it to external tape or cloud storage.

      • Gurvinder's avatar
        Gurvinder
        Moderator
        Follow any of the first two methods. You can recover dedupe those ways. I just mentioned about bedb.bak (take the data folder) and catalog folder so that once you import, you do not have to catalog the contents of the dedupe folder. If you back from shadow copy components then the dedupe related registry is also backed up.