LTFS Support for V-RAY

[moon12345]

I would like to see support for LTFS, especially in the V-Ray edition of BackupExec.  If we need to restore a file from TAPE of a virtual machine based backup we must stage the entire VHD to hard disk before the file can be restored.  Some of our VHDs are greater than 1TB in size.  This means a VERY long wait to restore what is usually a few MB file. 

If LTFS was an option for backups in BackupExec the VHD could be mounted directly from the tape and the file retrieved by directly seeking to that point in the VHD.  This would be possible since LTFS allows files on tape to be directly accessed vs needing to copy them back to hard disk first. 

I see this as an immediate need for BackupExec going forward, especially in enviorments where full virtual disks are copied to tape.  Restores could go from hours to minutes and would provide much improved restore times from tape. 

Hopefully my suggestion will show up as a feature in the near future.

Thanks,
Matt

[Larry_Fine]

The best place for idea suggestions is over in https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/backup-and-recovery/ideas

I am concerned that LTFS still has slow seek times compared to disk, such that this would still be unusable, but it is an interesting idea.

[moon12345]

Thanks Larry,

I will post over there.  I am less concerned about seek times as most VHD based backups are tansfers of single HUGE files to tape.  Right now it takes 3-6 hours to stage a 1TB VHD before a 3MB file can be restored.  This is TOO slow, especially when a file is needed quickly.  Even if seek times were 100 times slower than a HDD, it would be orders of magnitude faster than the current process of staging the VND to disk before restore.

The reason I suggested this is that I am finding my buddies in other divisions in my company are doing exactly this with VEEAM.  They run the backups to hard disk and then copy to LTFS tape.  They then use these as archives.  If they need to pull a file back they mount the VHD directly off the LTFS tape.  I watched them pull a 15MB file out of a 800GB VHD in about 15 minutes. 

They of course felt the need to then laugh at me and the amount of time it takes for BackupExec to do the same thing.  Granted this is something they are doing with a batch job now, but it really makes me want to go to that process just for the restore speed.

[CraigV]

...the only way around this with BE is to backup to disk first and retain as many backup sets on disk as you can.

Veeam does things no other vendor can do. Any vendor backing up via GRT to tape will always need to stage the entire application database/VM to disk before restoring a single file.

Thanks!

[teiva-boy]

CraigV is right on the money as always.

moon12345, you're doing it backwards.  You need to write to disk FIRST, then duplicate to tape or LTFS.  *Note some tape vendors can copy from tape to LTFS natively without the backup software involved.

This way GRT restores are done from disk, and are fast.  You don't have to stage a tape backup to disk, then BE do the restore.

Symantec has been selling the concept of disk first as a concept from the early 2000's when backupExec 11 was first released, and introduced GRT for Exchange.  

Now that deduplication is also more prevelant, you can store more copies of your backups in the same amount of space.  Maybe you could do a week or two in a few TB's before, with dedupe you can hold a months worth of backups available for quick recoveries, and address more than 90% of the user requests.

Even if you just get an inexpensive 5-7 drive NAS and use an iSCSI LUN or via CIFS, that will be worlds better than writing to tape first.