Running Two Backup Jobs of the Same Server

[MGBackup]

I have a server that houses about 7 TB. I make a full backup every weekend, but it runs for close to 223 hours and that makes the daily's skip because of the policy (I'm using the defualt media rotation policy). I have an HP LTO-4 tape library with 2 drives. I'm wondering about backing up the weekly with one drive and running the daily's on the other drive. Is that going to cause any issues, backing up the same server with two different jobs?

I haven't had too much time to look at the process of the backup job since this just started, so could someone clarify - does Backup Exec grab the data from the target server and cache it on the Backup Server before writing it to tape? Or does it grab each file individually from the target server when it's finished with the previous file?

Thanks for your help!

[Tom_Qin]

the diff is based on the full backup, if the full backup do not finish, the diff would not start or would become as large as the full backup.

You're using 100M network adaptor? The backup speed seems very little slow. You should check your backup network first.

After fixing your network, i think the better way for this problem is increase the bandwidth of your backup lan. ie. add 1 or 2 network adaptor and make both adaptors as a backup team. configure the backup only run on the backup network. so the backup bandwidth would become 3G.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Even with a 1GB network in place you've going to run for a very long time.
Our Data Centre runs ARCserve (couldn't put in Backup Exec due to Itaniums running!). Our SAP DB is huge and runs across a SAN, which takes 12 hours.
You'd have to look at trying to make your backups run a lot simpler:

1. Small SAN if you can afford it. You'd be taking advantage of 4GB/s throughput meaning your backups would actually finish before your next backup window starts.
2. Checking if you're running 100MB/1GB. See if you can change to 1GB and then start your backup as soon as it's possible according to business requirements. Change your NIC speeds to 1000MB FULL, and do the same on the switches to get the best speed out of them.
3. See if you can change the way in which your backups run. Try Differential backups, with your FULL backup running over the weekend.
4. Seeing if Backup Exec can do a multiplexing job (send multiple streams to the drives).
5. Change the location of the library physically to the server in question if it's not there already. Running a backup across a LAN is far slower than a local backup.

How big is your daily job? 7TB as well? If it's all going through SCSI, and the same SCSI card at that, it's going to take as long, if not longer, no matter if you backup to different drives.

[MGBackup]

That's what I was looking for. So it's best not to run a backup on the server that is currently being backed up. I would think restoring would be a pain as well.

1. We have a small SAN and are moving towards fibre, but we have to migrate this server to different servers before that.
2. Right, that's an easy fix.

That's what we'll do for right now.

Thanks for you input, it helped a lot!