BE2010: Verification very slow

[andre_baettig]

Hi

I just installed BE2010 (13.0 Rev. 2896 (32 Bit)) on Windows 2003 R2 Standart. I need to backup a NetApp FAS3140 (7.3.1.1P9) using NDMP. The backup process is fine (2910 MB/min), but the verification process is very slow with just 150 MB/min. The backupserver and the Netapp cpu is low during verification, same for the network.
Why is the verification process 20 times slower than the backup?

Thanks for your help

Regards,
Andre

[CraigV]

Hi Andre,

What the verification process does is check that the files that have been written to disk/tape are readable in case of a restore.
Depending on where you are writing too, it is going to take a bit of time.

Laters!

[andre_baettig]

Hi Craig

I tried to write to a local Disk (SAS, RAID1) and also to a NetApp LUN attached to the backup server. Both showed the same results. I think a verification ratio of 150MB/min and a restore ratio of 70MB/min is very, very poor! There must be something wrong with my settings!!

Regards,
Andre

[andre_baettig]

I did another test. I made a "normal" backup from local C: drive to the same BackupToDisk folder I'm using for my NDMP backup. This time the verification speed was 2900MB/min.
What's the difference between data writen with NDMP and data writen with file level backup? How can I speed up the verification process for my NDMP backup?

[CraigV]

Hi Andre,

Besides the type of technology, I would assume not much with the verification.
Below is a tech article from Symantec...give it a read. It is the best practices for BackuP Exec 2010...

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/340852.htm

Laters!

[teiva-boy]

NDMP data is not the same as normal backup data.  NDMP data from a NetApp filer, is a UFS_DUMP, it's a particular format being used by NetApp.  EMC NAS use a tar format, and other NAS vendors for NDMP use CPIO.  NDMP i just a communication protocol, with the actual backup format varying by vendor.  Good luck trying to restore your NDMP backup form NetApp on another vendors NAS. :(

Thus, additional processing must take place to open that data format, to do a verify.  

Plain and simple, NDMP sucks, but is a necessary evil in some cases.  In an ideal world, you would do a synthetic backup with an incremental forever model with target side dedupe.  Then backups would be very fast, can be stored for longer is a smaller space, and ultimately it can be restored ANYWHERE.  But alas, Synthetics in BackupExec have always been less than stellar on high file counts.