Enterprise Vault backup to tape strategy ?

[John_Santana]

Hi Folks,

Can someone give me input to suggest what is the best method or timing for the Backup strategy.

As at the moment the current 3rd party backup application called HP Data Protector capturing the following items:

• Open VaultStore Partition (1.2 TB NTFS 98% full)
• Index location (1 TB 65% full)
• Message Queue (4 GB)
• C:\ (60 GB)

those four components took more than 4 days to backup to the tape, during this time nothing goes into the EV archive as per my understanding, which leaves me only 2 days over the weekend to do the archiving of Exchange Journal mailbox (contains more than 210.000 emails) and the normal Exchange users mailbox which doesn't seems to catch up as per the policy to archive anything older than 6 months.

what is the proper way to perform the EV 9 backup to tape to reduce the backup window ?

is that behaviour is normal in the EV environment ?

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

You might want to consider a few things :

- Closing off partitions, and implementing a strategy whereby (for example) a new one is created every month, or every quarter.  That way the 'live' data will be a smaller footprint

- Backup to disk, and then offload to tape 'later'.

- If using EV 10 you can even close off index locations (though I'm not a big fan of that)

- Have a read of:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH147148

[John_Santana]

Rob, yes, I only backup the open Vaultstore partition, but still that took more than 5 days to finish. Hence the archiving task for journal and normal mailbox never be recent.

well, the current environment is already big as it is for the Storage Array can handle, total of 20 TB is assigned to EV

[A_J1]

Hello John,

As you said we are only backing up open partition which is 1.2 TB and 98% Full.

I believe you always take a Full backup of Enterprise Vault Open Partition and Index Location.

You can configure a stratergy of Full + Incremental Backup which would take less time to backup the Data.

As Incremental backup after a Full backup only Backs up the New Data added.

And once you Close the partition then you can take a Full backup.

About Backing up Indexes:

Indexes and archiving is an asynchornous process, that means you can have Index location in backup mode and still archiving will happen.

So you can schedule the backup of Indexes in a spearate job, instead of having all in one Job.

Also Make sure that the throughput your getting from the Backup Application is optimum, because there could be some scenario where the throughtput of the backup job is very low due to whcih it take more time to compelte the backup job.

I hope this helps !!!

[John_Santana]

Wow, that's cool and make sense A_J,

So what do I need to do to make sure that the backup of the Open VaultStore partition is done as incremental ?

I will plan to create the separate backup job for the Index only.

[A_J1]

Hi John,

You need to check the Backup Application HP Data Protector..

I am sure there would be an option to perform a Incremental backup..

And to know more how to configure it raise call with HP Data Protector support and you will get to kow more..

Now other Important thing i need to mention is 

you can backup using Archive Bit methos or Trigger file in EV..

To check in EV you Need to Go to the properties of the Partition and select the Backup TAB..

And accordingly you need to configure the Backup Job in the Backup application..

[A_J1]

Hi John,

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.BINARYPORTLET/public/kb/docDisplay/resource.proc...

Check the above link.. on Page No.13 it explains about Incremental Backup..

Also check this link :

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.BINARYPORTLET/public/kb/docDisplay/resource.process/?javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.rid_ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01=docDisplayResURL&javax.portlet.rst_ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01=wsrp-resourceState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c02029306-1%257CdocLocale%253D&javax.portlet.tpst=ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01_ws_BI&ac.admitted=1386821872936.876444892.492883150

Again as i said it would be good to open a case with HP and get it confgiured.

I hope this helps !!!

[John_Santana]

Cool, thanks AJ,

So in this case I have confirmed that all of the 20 VaultStore partition in my EV are using the "Archive Attribute" does that can cause the backup speed slowness issue ?

[A_J1]

No, as i said thats the archive method which is used to backup.

You backup could be slow because of the backup application.. 

[Rob_Wilcox1]

In the end, backing up 'almost all' of 1.2 Tb every time/day is going to be slow to tape... that's partly the 'tape' issue, and partly because in EV there are a LOT of files.

Try copying your partition data to somewhere, and you'll see how 'slow' it is relative to make a handful of 100 Gb files, and copying those.

It will get 'worse' when you fill out to the 20 Tb marker.  Sizing your disks in EV is not about how big you can make them, it's about how you back them up.

[Trafford]

One of the reasons backing up vault store partitions is often slow is because they contain millions of tiny files, exactly a backup application's worst nightmare.

To get around this you could enable "Collections" which is a background process whereby EV rolls up the small files in to 10MB CAB files. this can dramatically improve backup times.

Personally I favour Smaller VS partitions, 300-500GB. Get a handle on your typical archive rate, calculate how long it would take to fill 300GB, then use a time based strategy to automate partition rollover. (This way you dont run out of drive letters, and have a more flexible Vault store)

See the Admin Guide on Collections and TECH71338 - How to configure Collections.  The usual recommendation is to run collections after a reasonable period to allow freqent access to quiesce, typically 10 - 15 days. If you users a very active it may be better to only run collections on your closed partitions

On Backup generally there are many things to consider with EV. Key points are :-

Use backup mode to prevent changes during backup, I suspect you are doing that

Ensure that the Vault stores and their associated databases are backed up together to keep them consistent.  Remeber that the VS databases represent the state of the files in the VS, if they get out of sync there can be issues.

As mentioned Indexes are not quite so critical (If all else fails they can be rebuilt from scratch) not that you would wnat to do that 

There are lots of articles on EV Backup, Admin Guide CH25, Search the KB, in particular "Enterprise Vault Whitepaper - Backing up Enterprise Vault" brings most of what you need to know in a single reference.

Obviously Backing up and maintaining your EV SQL is critical, See Tech74666 - How to automatically backup & Maintain EV SQL DBS, and Admin Guide, CH3 Day to Day ADmin > Maintain SQL DBs

Remember you cannot restore individual archives, so if anything gets damaged, you will have to restore an entire Vault Store. You need to be confident you can do this, as usually the VS represents the only copy of the data it contains.
 

[A_J1]

Hello John,

Do you still needs any assistance on this ???

[John_Santana]

Wow, that's an eye opener to me Trafford :)

My SQL Server 2005 SP4 for the EV databases is backed once in a week in Sunday 11 PM, but the EV VaultStore is backed up on Monday morning 6:30 AM.

Do I have to make it the same schedule ?

I understand that my backup software is not in the EV drop down list of supported migrator http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH49714

HP Data Protector is not listed in that page, so do I need to take backup of the SQL Server and EVVaultStore Open partition and Index at the same time ?

[Trafford]

Hi John,

The key compnents that need to be backed up in sync are the Vault Stores and the Database. The indexes and other compnents, not so much.

So you put EV into backup mode, and then backup the Vault Stores and their matching SQL databases, and the fingerprint database(s) during this period.

If that is a problem and takes too long to get the whole job done you can break it up into chunks, and backup one vault store at a time with it's matching Vault store & Fingerprint database.

The documentation I mentioned discusses all this.

The white paper is your friend here

http://kbdownload.symantec.com/resources/sites/BUSINESS/content/live/TECHNICAL_SOLUTION/147000/TECH147148/en_US/EV%20Whitepaper%20-%20Backing%20Up%20EV%20(December%202013)-v2.pdf?__gda__=1387271885_abc90f01ee2cab3821eec3563153b52c

If you cannot locate it let me know and I'll send you acopy

With a bit of planning and careful set up is very possible to achieve the same end result with any Backup product, so your HP data protector should be just fine.

Assuming it has the capability to run Pre & Post scripts as part of its backup jobs you can quite elegantly integrate the EV backup.

Again in the Documentation there are instructions for creating scripts to put EV into and out of Backup mode, so you can integrate this right into your backup jobs.

You mentioned the Supported "Migrator" apps. Migration is another feature of EV (not Backup) which integrates with the CAB Collections. The idea is that you "Migrate" older cab files off your EV disk Storage to another lower tier backend storage system like tape. If access to the data in a migrated cab file is required, the integration with the supported apps allows EV to request the relevant cab file to be restored to EV for access.

I am not sure it is widely used. One of my clients tried it a few years back and had some issues. Apparently it has matured since then, but I would test it carefully before deploying on a large scale.

Other useful links

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO57152#v17808740

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH172279

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO56904&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1387264665359

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO57157&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1387264665359

[Trafford]

You might also try a search of the EV knowledgebase for "HP Dataprotector" I just turned up this thread on Backup Mode Scripting, which includes comments form a Data Protector User

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/backing-ev-remotely-setting-ev-backup-mode

THere a quite a few DP specific tips to be had.