EV 8.0 Backup Issues

[Yendis_Lambert]

Hi Everyone,

We have been running EV now for about 8 months and the vault partition has grown to about 250GB, which is making our backups fail/take a long time.  Has anyone got any recommendations about backing up EV as it is currently taking ages.

Any help or advice would be very welcome.

Thanks Yendis

Our Environment is Windows 2003 SP2 with EV 8

Our Backup Environment is Netbackup 6.5.3 and we are doing full backups everynight of SQL and EV server everynight.

[MichelZ]

Yendis You should close your Partition and create a new one. This way, you only have to backup the new, open partition on a daily basis, and you can schedule the closed partition for weekly/monthly backups. Have a look here: http://www.enterprisevaultfaq.com/wiki/EV_Documents_(Index) On the "Enterprise Vault Backups Best Practice" Guide. Cheers Michel

[Yendis_Lambert]

Hi Michel,

Thanks for your prompt reply.

How would this impact on current archives and items currently in the process of archiving and does it make any difference to the users, ie archive explorer?

Also what will happen if a user moves the location of an archive item (from one folder to another) if the partiton is closed down

Thanks Yendis

[MichelZ]

Yendis This does not impact any of those things. Closing a partition only means that no new data is written to it. Data is still being deleted from it, or modified. So in general the partition should not "grow" further, and no new items (requiring frequent backups) are written to it. Cheers Michel

[Yendis_Lambert]

Hi Michel,

That's great news, I do however have a couple of questions if you don't mind.

1)  It mentions in a document about setting up "collections" on the partition but we currently do not have this set, does it need it?

2)  Can the old partiion be closed down and the new one created when the server is in live production or do we need to take it offline to users?

Thanks for all your help with this.

Thanks Yendis

[TonySterling]

There is no need to take the server offline to open a new partition.  Just work through the wizard to create a new partition and at the end choose to create it open.  This will automatically close the existing open partition for you.

You don't need collections but it will help speed up the backup time for your closed partitions.

Regards,

[Yendis_Lambert]

Hi Tony,

Is there any recommendations/best practice on the settings of "collections" and how does it speed up the backup.

Thanks Yendis

[TonySterling]

Hey Yendis,
It helps the backups by taking a bunch of the small dvs files and putting them into cab files.  So, for example, instead of 100,000 small dvs you have 10,000 cab files. (numbers are for demostration only, actual number of cab files will vary according to your environment)

Without knowing the specifics of your environment it is hard to give  specifics, but generally the default settings work for most customers.

Regards,

[Carl_Swanson]

Yendis,

    When you close the partition make sure you give it another daily backup or two if you have the vault store set to remove safety copies after backup.

We try keep our partitions to 150 gig as like you backups were either failing or running well into the work day.

[Yendis_Lambert]

Hi Carl,

How do you currently backup you EV environment?

We are currently doing a full backup of both the EV and SQL servers every night.

When we have closed the partion we will still do a full backup everynight during the week (excluding the closed partition) but then do a complete Full backup of everything (including the closed partiton) at a weekend. 

Do you think our backup method is correct?

Regards Yendis

[MichelZ]

Carl I would recommend backing up SQL Server "Full" at every day, but it is not necessary to do a Full Backup of Enterprise Vault daily. I'd recommend a Daily incremental every day, and a Full Backup every weekend. Closed partitions with a full backup every week or every two weeks. Cheers Michel

[Yendis_Lambert]

We have closed off out 250GB partition1 and created a new partition2.  Can we just backup Partition1 only over a weekend without having to backup SQL and the rest of EV (Indexes and Partition2)

We are concerned about if anybody makes any changes to the old partition1 ie. deleting any archived items etc and not backing up the SQL and the rest of EV.

Thanks for your help