AOFO Performance Issues

[Benji]

Hi,

We've had backup performance issues for quite some time, we have daily differential backups of about 250GB and weekly/monthly backups of 900GB, dailys were taking roughly 15 hours to complete, and weeklys 60+. It was only slow when it got to the file server.

The other week AOFO failed to initialise and the weekly backup completed in 35 hours, we've now disabled the AOFO and our dailys finish in 5 hours. We backup exchange, numerous sql servers, domain controllers file/print servers etc. We've had no errors about files it can't backup.

Do you think it's a file server performance issue that's slowing the backup when AOFO is enabled?

At the moment we're going to keep AOFO disabled and if people are experiencing similar performance issues I'd suggest doing the same.

Ben

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

AOFO is awesome if you need to ensure your data is always backed up. That said, it does add some sort of time-penalty, especially when you have to backup up a large amount of data (our Head Office file server is over 650GB), and there are a large number of files (well over 1 000 000 for us).
Our backups take around 16.5 hours to complete, and I need to check out how to make them quicker.
That said, the speed of your tape drive, ability to use SAN SSO if it's in place, time your backup runs, running your jobs to disk first etc. can all affect the speed of backups.
Have you looked into upping the speed of of your backup device by increasing the buffer? Leaving off files like *.mp3; *.wav etc from your selection list by putting in an exclusion?

[CraigV]

Any updates/news?

[CraigV]

Dude, have you come right here?