need help figuring out offsite strategy

[derek500]

Hi folks,

 

I'm struggling with an offsite strategy that _used_ to work (I think) as expected, but lately has been giving me a bit of headache. I have 3 important backup scripts - scheduled nightly server and desktop (for different rule sets) and an always on proactive laptop backup script. I have a large RAID volume attached directly to the backup server and a tape library for offsite rotations (we send them offsite biweekly). The strategy that I though was working was that the proactive script would backup to the RAID, and nightly scripts would backup directly to tape. (saving the occasionally slow laptops from wasting tape). Once a week I would also back up the desktop and server scripts to the hard drive, so I would have some onsite 'reach' if I needed to restore an older file. Daily I would run a copy script transferring what's new on the RAID to tape, so I would also have my laptops in my offsite media.

 

The problem I'm having is that lately things don't seem to be working as I originally thought. When I start a new tape set, then my nightly scripts run and back up my servers and desktops to tape. This works as expected. Laptops back up neatly to the disk set. But when I copy the disk set to the tape set, it seems like WAY more than necessary is being copied. The disk set is 3.5 TB, and it seems like the entire 3.5 TB is being copied to tape, when I would expect only about 2 TB to be copied (just the laptops and some older files). So my offsite media has jumped from 5-6 tapes to 9-10 tapes recently. My backup sets haven't really changed size much.  I'm thinking the change has come along with 10.2, but not entirely sure. (hoping I didn't make a mistake in a script somewhere)

 

Has anyone else noticed a similar issue recently? Any suggestions on whether I'm doing something unusual?

 

Thanks

-Derek

[Lennart_T]

I would always run everything Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape.

Backup all the client to Disk Media Sets. Then do a "Copy Backup" from the Disk Media Set(s) to tape, biweekly.

[derek500]

Hi Lennart,

 

We started out doing that, but I found the Disk to Tape was taking too long, and the hard drive really seems to struggle after a few months of this. The nightly (incremental?) backups to tape happen quickly (6-8 hours to finish). Doing the same nightly backups to Disk start out fast, but as the disk set grows and grooms, they take longer and longer, sometimes running well into the next day (12-14 hours to finish). So I found this approach to be a reasonable 'blend' of speed and longevity. At least, I did for a while.

 

The disk RAID is a Lacie 4BIG connected through eSATA, and otherwise performs very very well (if I test it with a simple file copy etc). So I'm not sure how much of our problem is the hard drive, and how much is the catalog file becoming unwieldy, etc.

 

After upgrading to 10.2 I did do a full catalog rebuild of the disk set, and a full verify. Both went very well, completing in about 10-12 hours each.

 

Thanks

-Derek

[Lennart_T]

We schedule grooming every weekend, keeping the last 5 backups (which is one week's worth of backups). That keeps the size of the Disk Media sets down.

[derek500]

Yes, we do that as well. It's still a good sized backup set.

 

I'm just trying to figure out why my copy script is now trying to copy the entire disk set, whereas previously I'm pretty certain it only copied the missing portion.

 

-Derek