Best Practice for large tape backup job setup > 4TB

[PghKevin]

Hi everyone,I have one BE 2010 R2 media server backing up about 20 servers with dedupe to a SAN and to two Quantum autoloaders.  All of the jobs are running fine, I just worry about one.

We have a server that is currently hosting 4TB of files for the office.  These are images, video, Photoshop files, etc.  Design related files.  The original designer of the backup job for this folder made 12 backup jobs that run on the weekend which each backup a subset of folders under the share.  One backup job does folders that start A-E, another for F-G, etc.  to Z.  The problem with this is that I had to keep going back into every backup job weekly to edit the selection lists to remove directories that were no longer there, and add new directories that people have created.

To solve this problem, I just made one big backup job that does the entire directory to tape starting Friday nights after the last daily Dedupe runs on that drive.

The job takes 52 hours to complete.... we have LTO3 tapes and the job rate is around 1500MB/s or higher.

I worry about this because it takes so long to complete... if I were able to leverage both autoloader drives at once, it would finish faster.  The file server is able to dish out the data at a faster rate.  Is there a way I can get one job to write to two libraries?  If not, should I revert back to multiple jobs?  If I revert back... is there a better way to design a smarter selection list so I dont have to keep editing them?

[Kiran_Bandi]

if I were able to leverage both autoloader drives at once..

One job writing to two drives at once.. not possible with BE.

You can try taking backup to disk first and then you can try duplication that backup to tape.

Regards...

[PghKevin]

Yeah I didnt think you could send one job to two tapes at once... too bad.  The problem with backing up the job to disk first is that there is not enough disk...  Guess I can see about upgrading the SAN.

[CraigV]

...when you back up a dedupe folder to tape, it rehydrates the data to its original size.

That aside...why not look at doing daily Incremental/Differential backups Monday --> Thursday, and a full backup on a Friday? This brings your backup times and sizes down when backing up to tape, and then allows the full backup to run over a longer period of time over a weekend.

Alternatively, split your backups in half, and back up 10 servers in 1 job, and the remaining in another...

[Kiran_Bandi]

You can also think about taking incrementals of that 4TB directory. As you have files like videos in that directory it will be a good idea to configure Monthly full and daily incremental.

Regards...

[PghKevin]

Thats kind of whats happening now.  I have Daily incrementals going to the Dedupe folder for the 4TB share.  The full backup is going to tape starting late Friday night and running until Sunday night.  My concern is that it takes so long to complete because its one large job and not smaller jobs going to two tape drives.  The share is only going to get larger and it will eventually roll over to Monday morning on a full backup.  This can't happen.  So the question is... how do I back up 4TB of data FULL every week as quickly as possible without having to keep editing selection lists if the 4tb is broken down into a dozen jobs instead of one large?

[teiva-boy]

Do your full backups to disk, than duplicate to tape.  This way your backup is done, and the duplicate to tape can happen during office hours without worry about impact to the production network.  

As for disk, yes a new shelf of disk will do, or any old DAS/JBOD too.

[Kiran_Bandi]

Hi Kevin,

Any update here?

Can you please close the discussion by ,marking solution?

Regards..