Backup to Disk Issue

[Brian_Perry]

After hours of testing I finally figured out why my backups were taking way to long to finish.  Now I need to find a way around the solution that I have come up with.

Now for what I was doing.  I tested backing up 3.6 GB with 5,000 files and 700 folders.  Note:  this is with Veritas 10d.1 with the latest hotfixes and backup up to disk.

Explorer:          6:22

Veritas:            22.20

Veritas Fix:       4:17  this time includes verify

I was able to break the speed barrier by removing hotfix 27(for those of you that don’t know this is to pre allocate disk space to reduce/eliminate fragmentation.). 

I looking for suggestions on how to re-enable hotfix 27 and keep the fast backup time.  I would really like to re-enable this because before the fix I had to delete everything off of disk every couple of weeks due to high fragmentation.

Thanks.

[Ken_Putnam]

About all that you can do is submit  jobs during the day with a media set with a very low retention period, let the files pre-allocate, then overwrite with your production media set

[Robert_Schmidt_]

"I looking for suggestions on how to re-enable hotfix 27 and keep the fast backup time.  I would really like to re-enable this because before the fix I had to delete everything off of disk every couple of weeks due to high fragmentation."

Are your backups relatively consistent in size? You don't mention your backup strategy, but here's how I use B2D with pre-allocate:

I have a set of data that changes daily, but is fairly consistent in size - about 120Gb, which, with software compession on the B2D files, comes down to approx 33Gb.

I want a full B2D daily.

So, I created a B2D folder and set the max. size to 40Gb. I also created a media set for these B2D files with overwrite protection of 6 days.

Sure, the 1st time through the cycle it takes time each day to pre-allocate the 40Gb B2D file, but after the 1st time through, the file is there and is re-used a week later.