New DLO deployment - multiple questions

[Jeffrey_Lindhol]

Hello, getting right to it, these are my questions:

(sorry for the huge post)

I spent a good amount of time reading every bit of the manuals that I could get my hands on. Although there is a lot of it, and much of it could be interpreted a few ways. Here are the outstanding one’s:

1. Should you use the real-time “whenever a file changes” backup type, and if so, under what circumstances is it recommended that you do so? Conversely, under what type of conditions might you use a different type instead? Looking for best practices here.

2. When you get “file in use” errors in the logs, on PST files or other types of files, should you expect that you are going to always have these errors and should you just put up with them? Or is there a way to configure DLO such that these are only present in the few situations when there is actually a problem. Near 100% of our users have these errors, because pretty much everyone has Outlook or other applications open. What is the expected behavior in this case?

3. We have compression turned on, looking at the storage location, we are getting around 10% compression when most postings here say you should expect more like 50%. For example, a word document or access database file that will zip some 90% is only saving about 10% in DLO. Any ideas on this? Am I doing something wrong or is this expected? We have very fast client computers, and we are not using NTFS compression at either end. If this is the ratio we get it might be better to just turn this off to minimize CPU utilization.

4. The administrator manual recommends a maximum of 400 clients per “media server”. We have our “storage location” (where our user data synchronizes to on the server) and our “media server” (where DLO server software resides) on separate physical servers. Does this 400-user limit apply to only the media server, only the storage location, or both? We need to know so that we can plan our deployment to all 1600 clients.

5. Is there anything special that needs to be done to have a user synchronize between multiple desktops or a desktop and a laptop? In other words, if a user is configured for a machine, does DLO automatically start synchronizing as long as it considers it a valid user/machine configuration? Does the same hold true for if a machine is replaced due to a failed hard disk (machine name different)? What particular settings control this, if any?

6. Related to #5 – what is the best practice for deleting out “old machine instances”. Is it best to simply restore their data, delete them completely out of DLO, and then let it start over again on the new machine? Such as you might do if you wanted to move them to a new DLO server…

7. If someone closes Outlook 2003, and then tries to quickly open it again, they get an error because DLO is now backing up their PST file. This leads me to suspect that either incremental PST backup is not working, or that it is also doing a full backup, although I don’t know how you tell what is going on for these details. How do I verify that this is working properly? Some of our users cancel the running backup as a result of this.

8. The DLO client frequently crashes when the user is trying to perform a restore. The user then needs to logout/login again to get it back. How should I go about troubleshooting this? Often the file restore is successful even though the client crashes, I am assuming it is crashing immediately after.

9. We have only one revision enabled due to disk space considerations. This seems fine except in the case of a corrupted file. In particular, a user recently had a corrupted XLS file, and so DLO replaced the good backup with the corrupted one. We have compression turned on. I attempted to replace the file in their DLO store with one from our backup tapes of the DLO store, but this does not seem to work consistently for them. Perhaps it is because there is only 1 revision? By the time I tell the user to try and restore the file, only the corrupted one is available to them. In the end I had to restore the file from tape again, and restore it to my machine from the DLO server console and then e-mail them the file. Incidentally, when I did this, from the server console it immediately recognized the earlier version of the file as a “revision” of the existing file. What is the best thing to do in this case to make this type of situation work smoothly? Note also that this is one of those situations in #8 where the client crashes when trying to restore.


I can break these up into multiple posts, but I thought I would start off like this. I can call into support on these if this is not appropriate for the forums. Since we are relying on this product for all of our user backups, I really want to know this product inside and out.


Here are details of our environment:

We have recently setup Backup exec 10 with the DLO option on our new Windows XP and Office 2003 rollout. We have rolled out about 75 machines so far, and will rollout 1600 in total when finished. I had many problems initially, but have worked most of them out (in so far as getting it to work at all). Now I am looking in the logs on the server, and I have a ton of “file in use” errors, and that is what my question is related to.

We are using the “real time backup” option, as from what I understand, you have to use this option if you want to enable the incremental PST backup capability, is this correct? But we are also getting these errors on other types of files. I will assume for the moment that we would get these errors if we were backing up on a schedule as well, maybe not. If you are backing up only while the user is logged in, you will always have some files open.

It seems to me that the usefulness of this product is diminished a little if you have a “real time” backup option, but you know that this will fill up the logs with “file in use” errors. But before I leap to that conclusion, I want to make sure that I have everything configured correctly and I am following best practice. I would think that if you had a product doing real-time backups, that you would want to have some sort of threshold where you ignore “file in use/open” errors to a point. Or, in this case, since you are able to do incremental PST backups, that you would not get this at all.

Here is my situation:

> Windows XP service pack 2 + all updates / WSUS

> Office 2003 (with all the latest updates)
-- PST is using the new Office 2003 ISO format, not ANSI
-- PST files are located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\PST\username.pst
-- We have a “fake” drive letter F: that points to My Documents using the SUBST command, this is to support legacy applications that require drive letters. The above backup selection was needed to prevent 100% CPU utilization on the client when it would “see” that F: drive a real drive.

> Backup Exec 10.0 Rev. 5520, DLO 132B22A, client version 2.0.3
-- Set to backup “whenever a file changes”
-- Backup selections use C:\Docuements and Settings\%USERNAME%\(folder to be backup up)
-- Only backup 1 revision
-- Compression is on

> Restricted users:
-- Everyone has “user” level privileges
-- No access to C: drive except parts of their local profile (using group policy options)
-- Executable programs are “whitelisted” – only can run programs from a list of allowed one’s
-- Not using roaming profiles, all user data is in the local My Documents and backed up by DLO
-- Have access to DLO client, but can only view and restore files

I have read the forums a bit here, and have looked at the following:
http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/271486.htm - Incremental Desktop and Laptop Option backups of .pst files fail to run because the files are in use by another application.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/268078 - How to configure Backup Exec Desktop and Laptop Option to perform incremental backups of Outlook .pst files

http://support.veritas.com/docs/276644 - When backing up .PST files using the Outlook email client with the Backup Exec Agent for Desktop and Laptop Option, it gives the error :"The file is in use by another application. It will be retried.

Thanks in advance

-JCLEOT

[Renuka_-]

Hello,
- Real time backup would be required for important files that are constantly changing please note that this kind of backup is cpu intensive and depending on the storgae location and size of the files may increase network traffic.
-Please backup pst files using AOFO option, the outlooks should preferably be closed at the time of backup.
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