Forum Discussion

Drama's avatar
Drama
Level 3
13 years ago

NDMP Incremental backup on Netapp filer

Good morning everyone. Do any of you have a NDMP inclremental backup of a filer or Celerra in your platform? We are trying to switch to incremental backup from full backup, due to media comsu...
7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
  • Andy_Welburn's avatar
    Andy_Welburn
    13 years ago

    as we only carry out one full save per month anyway.

    Could you possibly break your save down into more manageable "chunks"?  I know NDMP saves do not allow the use of wildcards, so this would only be viable if you have a reasonable number of "folders" within the volume your are backing up. [EDIT You'd also need to utilise more drives if these streams were to run concurrently due to the inability (at the moment?) to multiplex NDMP saves to a single drive. /EDIT]

    e.g.

    NEW_STREAM
    /vol/vol1/dir1
    /vol/vol1/dir2
    NEW_STREAM
    /vol/vol1/dir3
    NEW_STREAM
    /vol/vol1/dir4
    /vol/vol1/dir5
    /vol/vol1/dir6

    The only other way we've got around this lack of NDMP wildcard functionality is to NFS mount the volume to our Solaris master & utilise the wildcards there - obviously you lose the speed of the NDMP in such a configuration, but it enabled us to reduce the backup window in the long run.

watsons's avatar
watsons
Level 6
13 years ago

I second Andy's suggestion, at least it would tell us which volume holds the millions of files and we could separate the volume out of the main policy to avoid long backup time. Well.. unless all your volumes basically had more or less same amount of data & files.

I don't think you can have much flexibility here using NDMP type of backup - as naturally the backup is done via the filer, not Netbackup. The external mount will be alternative and you can try to backup via Flashbackup type (to cater for millions of files performance issue). However, there is a tradeoff as Andy mentioned.

Maybe a offhost backup (snapshot the data and mount it onto another host for further backup, which offload the filer) would help as well, but I don't know much about this type - it's more complex in terms of configuration.