best practice to back up file servers
Hi, our master and media servers are all NBU 7.1 on Windows 2008 R2. We have 10+ file servers (all are Windows 2003, NBU 7.1 client). We found the data sizes in these file servers grow very fast. Now the total sizes grow to 10+ TBs. Every time it takes very long time to complete the full backups of these file servers. My question is: is there any way to improve the backup performance? what are best practice to back up file servers? One possible way may be to consolidate the file servers to fewer number of servers and then convert them to SAN media servers. Any other suggestions/recommendations? Thanks in advance.
This post is quite old but still unsolved.
I have voted for Mark's initial response.
Another 'quick win' is to break up big filesystems into multiple steams.
Ensure 'Allow multiple data streams' is enabled in policy attributes. Check directory structure on large user-drive. Break up Backup Selection into 4 - 5 streams, e.g.:
NEW_STREAM
x:\users\a*
x:\users\b*
x:\users\c*
......
.....
x:\users\h*
NEW_STREAM
x:\users\i*
x:\users\j*
x:\users\k*
....
...
....
NEW_STREAM
....
.....
......
NEW_STREAM
....
.....Make this change before a full backup to prevent incrementals running as full.