Forum Discussion

MortenSeeberg's avatar
10 years ago

Seeding an initial deduplication client backup with non-MSDP backup

I have used this procedure several times: https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH144437.html
but always only as it was intended, using existing backups in the MSDP to seed new clients to the same MSDP.

So now I have a client with some large remote file servers which I want to pre-seed the central MSDP with before we attempt a client-side-dedupe backup over the WAN link.

I was thinking that theoretically I could dump the clients backup to BasicDisk/NAS at the remote site, have them ship it in to the central site, import the backup, and duplicate it to the MSDP, and use it for seeding. Before I spend time testing it, I wanted to know if anyone tried this or have a better idea?

  • Hi Morten,

    Yes that works fine, did it 2 weeks ago.

    • Backup to Basic Disk (USB) at remote site (make sure you mount it as a folder / drive you can create again after you're removed it in order to clean up)
    • Run the backup
    • Move the disk to other site
    • Create an empty folder matching the remote storage unit and expire the backups
    • Import the backups by attaching to central media server
    • Duplicate the backup to MSDP
    • Then run your dedupe job either directly or as a duplication to the central MSDP.
  • Hi Morten,

    Yes that works fine, did it 2 weeks ago.

    • Backup to Basic Disk (USB) at remote site (make sure you mount it as a folder / drive you can create again after you're removed it in order to clean up)
    • Run the backup
    • Move the disk to other site
    • Create an empty folder matching the remote storage unit and expire the backups
    • Import the backups by attaching to central media server
    • Duplicate the backup to MSDP
    • Then run your dedupe job either directly or as a duplication to the central MSDP.
  • Great, and you used the seeding procedure on that client afterwards and got a high cache hit right away?

  • No need to peform the seeding trick as you'll have the actual client's data in MSDP and listed under that specific client.