1 Does compression on your backup jobs speed up or slow down data transfer rate?

: Compression should not affect you trasfer rate as backup exec only will set the job to use compression but it will be you tape h/w which would be responsible for doing compression

2 Would upgrading to a faster tape drive (LTO4/LTO5) actually speed things up?

: LTO4/5 tape drive is always best option to have as they are high performance tape unit

3 Is it time to move from Backup Exec to Net Backup?

: Netbackup is an Enterprise S/W used by for large scale enviorment so when you are using Netbackup you are going to have lot of option &  features as compared to backupexec only disadvantage would be it is too costl. So depending on this you can decide to go with netbackup or backupexec

Thank You

Offcourse LTO4 and LTO5 are much faster than your current drive, but keep in mind that your server(s) need to provice the data fast enought to the tape unit, otherwise the tapenunit needs to rewind frequently and this will decrease your backup speed.

With current data growth I see more and more that companies switch to incremental/differential backup on daily basis, and only full backups in the weekend, as you have more time to let it complete.

Hi Ciscokid,

I personally have seen an speed increase when moving from LTO2/LTO3 to LTO4. However...the biggest speed increase has been for database backups involving large files. The reason for this is because the data is treamed at a constant speed to the drive. UI haven't seen a massive improvement when backing up file servers directly to tape. Probably in the region of 150 --> 300MB/m.

Compression wouldn't slow you down...it just fits more data onto the tape. Encryption would slow you down, but you're not going to use it.

A simpler solution, and more of a temporary measure would be to look at using differential/incremental backups if you're unable to get a faster/bigger drive. This way your full backups can be configured to run over a weekend with less IO on the server which would affect backup performance.

Laters!

Hi All,

Thanks for your responses.

We currently run our fulls over the weekend so it is both incremental/diffs during the week and fulls at the weekend that are causing us a headache. 

Do any of you have experience of using a backup to disk feature in BE2010 on a high performance disk drive solution? then backing up the data on this disk to tape?

Hi ,

Doing the backup to disk is always best solution only it is costly so yes performance when doing backup to disk will always be good than backup you do on tape so yes if you can connect a drive using ISCSI which is local to backup server or a lun configured on san which is seen as local drive on backup server should help you to get a very good performance

Thank You

Another option is to use the BE Archiving Option.  This will allow you to send files that are not recently accessed to a vault area and you don't have to back them up during your regular backups which will only backup recently accessed files.  You would backup the file vault once in a while. 

Tuning Backups very much depends on your environment, you infrastructure, what you pain points are and your DR startergy.

However there are some quick gains, moving to differentials or incrementals is a good one for daily backups, SQL backups to disk which are then backed up to tape are a good way to get around scheduling problems, turning off verify can save a lot of time. Backup to disk is a good way to avoid contention on backup devices, but so is buying another tape drive or two and is potentially cheaper.

If you have VMWare environment an investment in some licenses to backup the VMDKs directly can be greatly benficial when doing full backups as you will be streaming large files rather than lots of small files and will be much quicker, also BE can talk directly to the storage rather than go through the ESX host.

Moving to LTO5 will not speed up anything much unless you can stream really big files. If a backup job is running at less than 4 or 5 GB a min it is unlikely that the tape speed is the restriction, it is more likely that reading the information off the storage and delivering it to the backup device is the problem, investment in a 10Gb network for your server may prove more rewarding it depends on how you do your backups.

After this you are looking analysing your Data, what is it and when is it changing. Do you really need to backup your C: and system state every day or week? Can you move data that changes to a seperate drive then program files and systems file on drives that only get backed up once a month. How would this affect your DR strategy? How do you use your backups? What are the leagl implications of keep file versions and how long do you need to keep each type of data? Is there any point keeping a backup of a SQL database beyond a week if that?