Restore times compared to backup times

[Paul_Defiglio]

Hi!

What are the restore times compared to backup times?

ServerA and ServerB are connected to the same gigabit switch.

We have a Powervault 124t autoloader (LT02) directly connected to the medial Server (ServerA) via an adaptec card. Out of hours Veritas on the media server backsup 750Gb of ransom data from serverB in around 15 hours. To restore the same amount of data back onto ServerB again out of hours what approximate times would we be looking at?

Throughput rate: 836 MB/min / Hardware Compression ON

Many Thanks

Paul

[CraigV]

Well, I cannot give you a set time or ration. However, restore times should be quicker that backup times.
Writing data always has a performance impact, be it to disk or tape. However, restoring from tape is going to be quicker. It shouldn't take you 15 hours (but don't quote me on that).
From experience, we back up around 250GB on 1 of our sites, taking around 4 hours.
After that server crashed, I restored the data in just over an hour. This was to the same server.
Disk is also going to be quicker than tape, but because you're running the restore (and your backup) across your LAN, it's going to take longer.
If you have the space, do a test run of backing up 100GB, and then restoring it.
In this case, your LAN is going to be your bottleneck.
It's going to be difficult to work out an exact time, as your tape speeds drop/increase depending on whether or not it's restoring small files, databases, large files etc.

[Symanticus]

According to the BE 12.5 FAQ:

http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/other_resources/b-backupexec_12.5_faq_10-2008_69739.en-us.pdf

the restore process of an entire Guest virtual machine to its original location must also be processed via VMware
Converter which can add additional time to the restore operation.

hope this helps.

[Paul_Defiglio]

Hey thanks for those great comments. Yeah I think a test restore is the way to go if in doubt. The data is made up of all sorts of stuff such as Adobe PD'f's, Office files, Images etc etc. Some no more than a few kb's and others could be over 100Mb. A 10Gb restore I did from ServerA to B during peak business hours took around 30mins (and I think a backup on B was running at the same time too) so you just can’t use that as a basis..

Will post back should I run with it!

Cheers
 

Paul

[Abhijit_Soman]

Hi

The restore job generally take more time than your backup window which is again depends on whta type of data you are restoring. The causes for slow restoration are as given below.

1. When you perform restore or backup from tape it will be time consuming because tape can perform 1 operation at a time where as disk can perform multiple operations. So for tape the seek time will be always higher than disk
2. When you are performing restoration, it read the catalog, re-create folder hirarchy on the destination and again compare it with catalog
3. When restoring data to the remote target server it actually sending the data from tape through backup server NIC to remote server. So you need to check network connectivity also.
4. Try to restore data on local drive on backup server

[Paul_Defiglio]

Thanks for that. As long as I have a weekend window to restore (48 hours) then I should be OK. I was thinking of putting the tape unit onto the server that requires the restore but I don’t want to bring any more problems into the equation!

[CraigV]

Nope, stick with the same backup environment. No need to start swopping out hardware. Your weekend should be quiet.

[CraigV]

How did this go? Was it a solution/answer to your query?

[CraigV]

Hi,

Can you close this off with a solution if possible?

Thanks!