Best Practices for System State Backup

[BackupNovice]

I have 51 servers in one environment that needs the System State backed up. Our current backup process does a disk to disk copy to a central location and then backs up to tape. We start this backup two hours before other backups kick off to try to get it to finish. However, the disk to disk portion takes on average 13 hours to run and the disk to tape portion never finishes Monday through Thursday because we need to put that night's tapes in. This is about 315 GB of data.

My question would be how can I get the system state to backup successfully every night.We have the previous days System States backed up to disk, but our boss would like it on tape just in case we have corruption of data, we can restore from tape.

Please let me know any ideas that can imporve our system state backups.

Thanks.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

You might want to consider using a tape library so that you have a longer time to do the B2T.

[BackupNovice]

If I read your comment correctly, are you saying we should put the System State directly to tape and cut out the Disk to Disk job?

[Nabil_polska]

the right way is to :

 backup of your system state to disk and duplicate job start immediatly after  to tapes,

[BackupNovice]

Part of the problem is my System State backups ran fairly fast until I added in Windows 2008 servers once we upgraded to Backup Exec 2010 R3. Now instead of taking 3 to 4 hours, the backups take 13 hours. Any ideas on how to fix this issue? A solution to this would help me keep both D2D and D2T jobs.

[pkh]

Are you on SP2 and the latest hotfixes?  If not, run LU a couple of times until it says that here is no more updates.  You would need to push out your remote agents after this and reboot both the media server and the remote servers.

[BackupNovice]

The only item in LU is Hotfix 195395. My System State backups finished in 4 to 5 hours before I added in 16 Windows 2008 servers. Once I added these new servers in, the backup went from 4 to 5 hours, 35 servers, to 13 hours with 51 servers. I am perplexed at why it increased in time so much.

[pkh]

Yes.

[pkh]

If all these servers are in 1 job, try to split them up into a couple of jobs and then see whether there is a reduction in the overall backup time.