Dedupe and verify

[Bubbagump]

I am using a Weekly Full/daily incremental scheme to backup our servers to a dedupe folder that resides on a SAN. Now I am a bit confused by the need/process to verify backups as the docs and various threads here somewhat contradict each other.

If I check the verify option within a job or template I am warned that it can degrade performance. Fine. So I create a template to run a verify immediately after the back up which surely logically seems to be the same load on the server with the only difference being it is a different job. The performance of these verifies are typically not great be they separate jobs or part of the original backup job.

Else where on the forums here someone said forget about verifies when going to disk as a verify is really something for tapes.

How do I know what is in my dedupe folder will actually restore short of doing an actual restore?

Now, assuming that one really does want to do a verify and they are of real value, is there a way to schedule the verify to happen say 12 hours after the backup job? If I have two backup jobs running and one completes and goes straight to verify, how have I avoided any performance hit? I still have reads and writes at the same time rather than all jobs writing or reading at a give time.

Thanks for any insight.

[macpiano]

I too have asked this question and with over 2 TB of data and duplicating to another dedupe folder I will not verify the jobs. I don't think it is anymore insecure than your regular files on your file server. The key will be to duplicate that dedupe folder to tape as that will reassemble your data. From there you can just try some files off the backup to tape and see how they are. My server that I use to dedupe is a Raid 1+0 and if you use an external storage such as Equlogic etc. there is even more redundancy built in.

Symantec always recommends to verify to cover themselves.

[Sush--- · Accepted solution]

Else where on the forums here someone said forget about verifies when going to disk as a verify is really something for tapes.'

This is not the case at all. Verify operation is also valid for backup to disk and to dedupe folders. In verification it checks the checksum and checks if the data is correctly backed up or not and ensures that the data is not corrupted.

How do I know what is in my dedupe folder will actually restore short of doing an actual restore?

Well, you will be able to see what is the data in the Dedupe folder only from the restore selection list window.

is there a way to schedule the verify to happen say 12 hours after the backup job?

Yes. During the creation of the Verify template in the Policy you can schedule the job to run at specific time. So for example if you observe that the main backup to dedupe folder is completed at around 8 AM in the morning then you can scedule the verify job to start at 6 PM in the evening or as per your requirement. Then only thing that you need to take care here is that both the backup job and the verify job from the same policy should not run at the same time.... they should not clash at any point.

Thanks,

-Sush...