EV9 and Backup Exec 2010

[Jun1or]

Hello All

I am looking for a new backup stratergy using BE2010 using EV agents.

Current environment:

We have 2 EV servers and a dedicated SQL Server, EV1 is used for email archiving EV2 is used for file archiving. Our current backup strategy involves full backup of everything in EV (SQL,Open Partitions, Index location) to Disk and when backup reach's 800GB we do the partition rollover then backup the data on disk to tape, current full backup is taking over 20hours.

Problem:

The partition's remain small as the rollover is done frequently, the issue is the Index Drive continious to grow and the backup to disk then tape is done more frequently and I can only imagine it will get worst and the backup times will increase.

I understand the index store is important and is required to access archived data, how can i work around this issue? I was thinking to change from daily full to differential backups and a full backup on the weekend this will at least minimise the backup time, however will not resolve the ever increasing data.

What can i do to reduce the space? Ideally on the Index drive?

Thank You

[AndrewB]

First of all you can close index locations just like you can with vault store partitions. Second, I strongly recommend for this case to upgrade to EV 10 because in every version before 10, closed index locations are only closed to new archives. Existing archives would still write their data to the original index locations. This has changed with EV 10 and directly addresses the challenge you have. Also, sure, why not go ahead and switch to differential or incremental during the week and leave the fulls to the weekend when you have the luxury of time on your side.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

ok so first of all, Indexing is not necessarily required to access data.
For instance if you have shortcuts in your inbox or on a folder with FSA, if you double click the shortcut, you can still retrieve the messages regardless of whether the item is indexed, or whether the indexing service is up and running or not.

However if you wish to use Browser Search or Archive Explorer, you will not be able to search the items or see the items in Archive Explorer.

So really it all depends on what you're using Enterprise Vault for, are you using it for mailbox/file management to keep the inboxes small and the file servers small? Or are you using it for compliancy and using using Discovery Accelerator to help with legal cases? Or may be a mixture of both.

Index drives will always continue to grow.
There are some things that you can do to reduce the space on the indexes which involves decreasing the indexing level, an indexed item typically takes up 13% of the size of the original item, so if you have a 1MB item, the index will take up ~130k for that item (obviously depending on what the item is, so if its a big picture file then it will be far less than 130k, but if its 1MB of pure text then expect the full 130k to be taken)

You can change it to Brief or Medium indexing  which can reduce the foot print to below 10%, but you lose the ability to do more detailed searches, so if you put the indexing on brief for instance, you may find that your search results in Discovery Accelerator will be far less and not adequate enough for a legal team.

Some companies also opt to disable indexing for files archived through FSA, so that you could archive 1TB of files on your file servers, but none of them will be added to the index. so based on 1TB of data archived, you could have ~130GB of indexed data on full indexing, but could be absolutely zero with deferred indexing.

To be honest though, your best bet is to just change how often you are doing the full index backups, depending on your business use of Enterprise Vault, the indexes may not be critical, because the data is never really lost, you can just rebuild the indexes and it will recreate the index by going through the EV Storage and re-processing them

Where as if you lose data from your actual vault store partitions, there is no way to recreate that data without having to revert to a backup. The only time when you may want to make sure you are absolutely on top of your backups and not wanting to rebuild is if you do use DA extensively and your company may incur fines due to not being able to produce results quick enough
 

[Jun1or]

The Server OS is Windows 2003 and EV10 only works on Windows 2008. Unfortunately we are not in a position to upgade to this. We are looking at a virtual solution in the near future and will upgrade to EV10 on this infrastructure.

What issues will closing the index cause?

[Jun1or]

Firstly Thanks you very much for taking your time and explaining this.

We are using EV for both purposes, primarily keeping mailbox sizes down and upon requests searching the journal/archived emails for legal purposes. I believe we do have users in the organisation using the search feature, as our archiving policy is 4 weekly.

File archiving is currently in test phase and will be implemented in the next few months, so i expect the Index to grow rapidly. Maybe we can separate the Mail Index from File index when backing up as we have TWO servers (one for email and two for File)?

It is a good idea to backup the index drive only on the Friday allowing enough time to finish over the weekend. The only issue here is the Index drive will continue to grow, currently it is 484GB, what happens when this grows over 800GB alone? This along with Vault Data will not fit on TWO Tapes, if possible is it worth closing the indexes when these reach a certain size (i.e.300GB) then back these to tape and start new Indexes?

Thank You