FSA backup with netbackup

[V4]

Do we have any best practise for FSA backups with NBU

Requirements are as follows

7TB File Server (Actual Data)

3 TB Archived data

i believe windows policy type would only backup placeholders not actual file content

EV FSA partitions requires another policy to be created

in case of data loss how should be recovery procedure. Is below correct

Restore EV FSA first

Restore placeholders from MS-Windows backup

pls share your views

(PS: i guess if placeholders are deleted mistakenly by users, they can still search and retrieve file from search GUI, besides from backup perspective we needed solution)

[Marianne]

Some reading matter:

About disaster recovery of an Enterprise Vault site
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO54564 

 

Disaster recovery requirements for Enterprise Vault server
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO54551

NetBackup Enterprise Vault Agent Portal
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH126523

[RahulG]

You can re-createte the placeholder using the FSAutility within Enterprise vault. 

refer the following document

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH51039

[V4]

Hi Marianne

Thanx for valuable info... It was helpful resource

But i'm more hungry ;-).. Above TNs are specific to EV DR and it's mnethod with NBU. it is no where specified whethere placeholders are actually required to be backed up via MS-Windows policy ?

Or only EV FSA backup would be sufficient?

Also any cons if FSA backups are targeted to DeDupe ?

[RahulG]

You can backup your Ev server (Sql database \Vault store Paritions \Indexes) that should be sufficent . You can recreate the placeholder.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO37834

[Jeff_Shotton · Accepted solution]

I wouldn't solely rely on using FSAUtility to recreate the placeholders. For a start it is only going to create the placeholders as they are recorded in the enteprise vault database - this would not deal with copies of the files which may possibly exist for one reason or another. Secondly it is going to take a lot longer to do the restore because you would be doing an NBU restore followed by FSAUtility. Finally, while this tool is getting better all the time, it has been known to have a few issues.

Regarding the backup of the actual file system, NBU is going to recall the files from storage by default. It is going to look at the file as a regular file and the placeholder service will serve it back. This is going to cause you several problems - namely slow backups and a huge load on the EV server, and more than likely you will hit the recall throttling limits. To bypass this, you need to either add the NBU agent into the recall bypass list, or turn on FSA backup mode:

exclude items from recall : http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH51039

using backup mode : http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO49532

NBU WILL back up and restore a placeholder and all its associated extra NTFS properties correctly (some applications do not)

On the subject of de-dupe, I very very much doubt there is much chance of there being de-dupable data in a placeholder. They are smaller than a 4kb block.

Regards,

Jeff

[V4]

thanx jeff. will check on this... Prior to rolling out backup solution in production EV environment. Will try in UAT and see if there are impacts or any performance issues seen at EV or file server 

(SAN backup will be helpful for these small chunk of file to process quickly or any better way to tune it)

[Jeff_Shotton]

If you are doing a block level backup of the disk, then you won't have to worry about backup mode.