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Richard_C's avatar
Richard_C
Level 2
12 years ago

Offsite copy delay

I'm hoping someone could shed some light on a fairly strange issue I am having with a client.

My client has a single server running Windows SBS 2011 Std + Symantec System Recovery 2013.

They have a backup every two hours to an internal 1TB SATA hard drive located inside the server.
After the backup completes it should than carry out an offsite copy to one of two external 1TB USB hard drives which are plugged into the same server and are rotated daily.

The backup itself does not have a problem running and completes successfully with incrementals competing within two to three minutes, and the offsite copy around five to six minutes to the USB drive.
 
My issue is, that the time between completing the backup to the internal drive and starting the offsite copy to the USB drive appears to be increasing after every backup.
 
For example the 08:30 backup completes at 08:34, than the offsite copy starts at 08:35.
However than the 10:30 backup completes at 10:34, but the offsite copy does not start until 10:45.
Followed by the 12:30 backup finishing at 12:34, than the offsite copy starting at 12:55
The increasing gap generally doesn't follow a particuarly patten, sometimes the gap increases by two minutes, other times by ten.
 
If you leave this to continue, you eventually have a situtation that the offsite copy does not complete until two hours after the orginal backup took place. Which causes problems particuarly at the end of the day when my client wants to take the USB hard drive offsite with the most recent incremental point on it.
Manually running a backup does exactly the same thing and I have tried starting and stopping the System Recovery service which has not made a difference. I have also tried recreating the backup job from scratch with no joy.
There are no errors in the event logs which simply state when the backup starts and finishes, and when the offsite copy finishes.
 
Does anyone have any suggestions to this?
 

 

 

Backup and Recovery
SSR 2013
System Recovery
System Recovery (core)
System Recovery Browser
System Recovery console-UI
System Recovery Copy hard drive
System Recovery Offsite copy
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Richard_C's avatar
    Richard_C
    Level 2
    12 years ago

     

    Initially my client picked this up as he receives high and medium priority emails. He has used the system before so was used to receiving the emails one after the after in quick succession. After a while he noticed that the gap between high priority and medium appeared to be increasing.

    Following on from this, my monitoring of the start times comes purely from observing the server itself while logged in remotely.

    I have followed up with more testing with this issue:

    1) Rebooted the server - no change
    2) Logged out of the admin account (usually the server just remains at the locked screen) - no change

    The system has all available Windows updates installed.
    There are currently no scheduled tasks (other than the usual SBS ones)
    The only other software that resides on the server is Symantec Endpoint Protection + Symantec Management Console and Symantec Mail Security.

     

    Some more information regarding the backup schedule which I missed out from my initial post:
    A new recovery point is made every Monday at 19:30. 
    The system will make a maximum of two recovery points

     

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    12 years ago
    For example the 08:30 backup completes at 08:34, than the offsite copy starts at 08:35.
    However than the 10:30 backup completes at 10:34, but the offsite copy does not start until 10:45.
    Followed by the 12:30 backup finishing at 12:34, than the offsite copy starting at 12:55
     
    I'm interested to understand how you are monitoring the start time as the logs only show when the copy has completed.