Need to be able to copy the deuped files to another building then reassemble there

[macpiano]

I have tested extensively about a million ways this week. Building A and B are connected with a 100MB connection. Dedupe Server in Building A can deupe a server in the same rack at a rate of over 3 gigs a minute. Dedupe server in Building B dedupes that same server in Building A at a rate of about 330 MB per minute. If I can copy the actual dedupe files from Building A to Building B across the WAN they would be a lot smaller after the first full backup which is what I need. I have about 3 TBs total to get across that 100 MB connection. I want to reassemble those deduped files to building B's tape drive. Forget client side deuping because the file server has 2 TB of files and I get about 100 MB per minute on a dedupe job that way.

My point is that if using dedupe across the WAN is the same speed as just backing up to tape from a server in Building A to Building B's tape drive what good is even fooling around with deduping? I just tested this and going to tape is the same speed across the WAN is the same as deduping it.

thanks

Gary

[AmolB]

Dedup is meant for saving space and not time, although time will be saved but not to great 

extent.You can copy the deduped files but you cannot reassemble them coz lot of data

processing happens when you run a dedup job. Dedup maintains its own database to store

the information. So if you just copy the files it will not work. Duplicating the deduped data to

tape is more time consuming as data will be rehydrated to its original form.

[macpiano]

What about (from the documentation) to perform regular bakups of the dedupe folder to removable media? I just tried it from Building A's dedupe folder to Building B's tape drive and had to cancel it because it was eating up my bandwidth which is a good thing. I can't get regular dedupe to go above 60% of the pipe so this is better.

My concern in this whole process is to get some type of backup out of the building itself. It is not necessary that I have the files themselves rehydrated to the other tape drive. I'm only concerned about in case the server room would catch on fire etc.

[AmolB]

For disaster recovery of dedup folder refer to the article.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO23336

[macpiano]

I think my scenario will be dedupe the files then shadow copy to the Building B's tape drive. Since I can retrive individual files from the dedupe jobs for the normal "Hey I accidently deleted my folder" scenarios I really only need the shadow copy to tape for disaster of the server?

I would assume the deduped files sitting on the tapes would be just as reliable as individual rehydrated files on the tapes especially considering I will be doing regular backups of the deduped files to tape.