Backup Exec 2010 R3 - Not backing up all data using "Full" (Using Archive Bit)

[toby_raistrick]

Hi all,

We have a network of servers that are being backed up Daily using an invcemental backup Monday - Thursday and there is then a Full Weekly backup that is run on a Friday night using Full, Using archive bit.

The idea for us is that any changes made through the week are backed up in the inremental backups Monday-Thursday and then on Friday, all of Fridays changes and the whole network should be backed up onto tape.

However, we have noticed that the backup dosent seem to be the including all the files as our whole network SAN is 2.93TB Usage and there is currently only 2.1-2.5TB being written to tape. We can confirm this by looking at how many tapes it actually used, as well as the Backup Job and the Verfication log.

For example, today is Monday, and Fridays Full Weekly backup is shown to have completed, and when I check the Job history it shows that 2,189,766,664,014 bytes have been backed up. This is 2.18977 TB but our whole usage of the SAN is 2.93 TB.

This SAN is attached to the same server as Backup Exec, meaning that it shouldnt even go over the Domain to get the SAN.

However, in the same job, the Backup process does goes onto the Domain to get some off site VHD's for remote servers. This isnt affected and backs up sucessfully.

We have tried many things and still dont know what is causing the files not to be abcked up. No matter whether the archive bit is turned off or on for a perticular file, it should be backed up every week to tape.

Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated and I am happy to explain anything else if needed.

Many Thanks,

Toby

[pkh]

Automatic File Exclusion will automatically exclude certain file types from a backup e.g. Exchange .edb files, SQL Server .MDF files, etc. Use Cattools to dump out the catalog and check which files are not backed up. http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH136392

[toby_raistrick]

Hi Pkh,

Many Thanks for you suggestion, I have been looking through the text files that have been created and I cant seem to make sense of them. They're such big text files (100-200 MB) are its just infinate scrollings through random text.

I can see line by line a file that it appars to back up or do something with, are these all the files that its missing and cant download every day?

If this is just a log or random sump file then how to I refine down to see the files that have been skipped or failed to backup.

Many Thanks again,

[VJware]

Out of curiousity, if you run a native Windows backup, do you get all the files backed up ?

[toby_raistrick]

Hi VJware,

I am not able to run a Windows Server Backup as it is not installed as a feature on the server and we have a very specific and set file selection. As well as this, there is no extra or spare space or hard drives available.

Sorry about this,

[VJware]

If this is just a log or random sump file then how to I refine down to see the files that have been skipped or failed to backup.

If any flat/regular files are skipped or cannot be backed up, they will be mentioned in the backup job log itself. It's just possible, that the data contains either system files which cannot be backed up at all or contains special files such as .mdf, .ldf etc which (as mentioned earlier by pkh) are automatically excluded.

[pkh]

What you see in the cattools output are files which are backed up. You need to figure out which files are NOT backed up.