Incremental without a Full First

[Mike_at_V3]

Our consultant set us up to have one large job that ran on our file server.  The full on this server was taking six to seven days to run.  This is too long.  I broke the job down into smaller pieces so that various folders get backed up by different jobs that run concurrently.  By alternating wekends when these jobs run I'm able to get my fulls without impacting production during the week very much.

Now I'm running into a problem where the incrementals won't run because only one incremental at a time can use the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (see below for the error).

One solution that occurred to me is to make the fulls separate jobs per folder or share but do one large incremental on the weekends when the fulls aren't running.  I'd rely on the "Prior Versions" available through the OS for "in week" restores.  Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to have an incremental ONLY job.  BE 2014 appears to require a full first.  

What am I missing?  Is there a different strategy I should use?  I'd appreciate some thoughts and assistance. 

Errors 
Click an error below to locate it in the job log
Backup - Snapshot Technology: Initialization failure on: "System?State". Snapshot technology used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

V-79-10000-11233 - VSS Snapshot error. A Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot is already running on the target computer. Only one snapshot can run at a time.  Try running the job later.

Exceptions 
Click an exception below to locate it in the job log
Backup- ILWD-ITFS01.V3CO.com - Snapshot Technology: Initialization failure on: "E:". Snapshot technology used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

V-79-10000-11233 - VSS Snapshot error. A Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot is already running on the target computer. Only one snapshot can run at a time.  Try running the job later.

[Colin_Weaver]

6-7 days to run sounds like you need to get you consultant back in to design a better solution.

Is this because of a really big byte count, or a huge number of small files on the volume?

If it is because of a huge number of small files then you probablay need to look at products that can do block level imaging of volumes instead of file level.

If a huge byte count then you may need to look at optimizing performance of your environment and / or doing things like backup to disk if you are using tape etc (which you can also try for lots of small files)

BTW with Backup Exec we do not recomend incremental forever as a strategy hence we enforce that you do run a full with incrementals (and also suggest that you schedule that full and don't only run it once never to run it again)

[Mike_at_V3]

We have a large number of files spread out over a single large volume on our SAN.  The SAN is currently about 6 TB and we are doing a back up to disk and duplicating that to tape.  

We put in a faster RAID card to improve performance but still haven't seen the necessary speed improvement.

We are scheduled to add NIC teaming to enhance throughput but needed to wait for help with the Cisco switch side of that.

To clarify, our strategy is to do monthly fulls with regular incrementals.  We are trying to use the volume shadow copy feature to be the "daily" incremental to reduce the number of backup exec incrementals.  We had been doing four daily incrementals on Backup Exec 2010 but when the consultant suggested the volume shadow copy option instead we figured we'd do a nightly (or perhaps weekly) incremental.  

In backup exec 2010 I was able to do monthly fulls and four time daily incrementals without problem.  In 2014, not so much...

[Colin_Weaver]

Backup Exec does a VSS operation with all newer windows operating systems versions so when you state "Volume Shadow Copy" option do you mean inside Backup Exec or are you scheduling VSS operations in the OS first? If you have changed the VSS configuration of the operating system between Backup Exec 2010 and 2014 then this might explain the difference in performance - as for VSS (Full and Incremental Requests) 2010 and 2014 worked the same way (although of course did not support the same operating systems)

There is another difference between 2010 and 2014 however, I believe 2010 defaulted to using Archive bits for backups and I think 2014 uses a change journal (you can change these settings though - if you do change them change them prior to running a full.)