Can a backup be performed in installments.

You have several choices here: (let say M: and L: are huge data drive, that's why the backup takes 24h)

- Create 2 policies with M drive for the first one and L drive for the second one.
- You can try Multiples data stream and add 2 stream in the backup selection list. You could have this way a 2 drives backup.

Also is 24h a normal duration for your backup ? or is it slow because of the network ? When you have huge database or file servers, you could think of getting the SAN Media licence.

Another option would be FlashBackup which is just the advanced client license and is much cheaper than SAN media server.

Aaron,

I never had the chance to use flashbackup, in his case, what could he do ?

Flashbackup to disk ? SAN disk of the client ( or local disk if he had enough free space), and then backup the disk after to the tape via the LAN as a classique LAN backup ?

Thanks

Much like your post, it all depends where the bottleneck is.
Flashbackup does a raw type backup of the disk which takes out the filesystem bottleneck (the most common one) The drawbacks are that the fulls are full partition backups so they only work well where your filesystem is at least 75% full or so. We have been able to saturate tape drives with this type of backup (20-30MB/s on LTO1) where our normal filesystem backups we can only muster around 10MB/s.

My question would be, what type of throughput are you getting currently, what is the speed of your tape drives, and what is the speed of the network.

Firstly Thanx for all the replies...

I'm having a LTO2 drive with a Gigabit network but even though i'm getting the speed of 4.5MBps.....

One more thing is that my server is heavily loaded and the data backup size is 415GB....

Probabaly the bottleneck is the server performance itself...

You would definitly benifit from Flashbackup I believe.