Very slow VXA Restore

[denniskane]

I've been using a VXA autopak for 9 months or so without a hitch. Backing up and restoring my clients with no problems - somewhere in the 5-30 MB/min range over the network. Today, I tried doing a restore and got the abdominal speed of less than 0.1 MB/min. Today's restore used 7 hours to restore about 40 MB before I killed it. Thought that it might be the network, so I tried disconnecting the network and restoring to a local firewire drive. I got the same surprisingly low speed. No idea what's going on, but I could swear that I don't hear the tape fast forwarding. Could be that the first tape in the set is defective. Just tried cleaning the drive and starting another run. If that doesn't work, guess that I'll try another data set.

 

 

 

Here are the stats -

 

Running Mac OS 9.1 on a beige G3 tower

 

Retrospect 4.3 at 40 Meg of memory

 

Catalog is pretty big, about 800 MB for 34 VXA 33/66 tapes.

 

 

 

I am open to suggestions and WAG's. Thanks.

 

 

 

Dennis Kane

[denniskane]

Miraculously the autopak is working now. The restore is clipping along at 6 MB/min picking up the early matches. I expect that to shoot up once it hits the full backup of that client. I did a lot of things included below. Based on the sequence of events I suspect that the drive needed several good cleanings. There is an outside chance that disconnecting the firwire drive helped too, but I'm pretty sure that it was the additional cleaning that I did this morning.

 

 

 

Thanks to all that helped.

 

 

 

DK

 

 

 

P.S. I am considering turning off matching. I would assume that would speed up restores quite a bit, although my initial backup of a client might take a nasty hit.

 

 

 

--- Dennis Kane wrote:

 

> I've been using a VXA autopak for 9 months or so without a hitch. Backing up

 

> and restoring my clients with no problems - somewhere in the 5-20 MB/min

 

> range

 

> over the network. Today, I tried doing a restore and got the abdominal speed

 

> of

 

> less than 0.1 MB/min. Today's restore used 7 hours to restore about 40 MB

 

> before I killed it. Thought that it might be the network, so I tried

 

> disconnecting the network and restoring to a local firewire drive. I got the

 

> same surprisingly low speed. No idea what's going on, but I could swear that

 

> I

 

> don't hear the tape fast forwarding.

 

>

 

> I've eliminated -

 

> Network problems (see above)

 

> Dirty drive (cleaned it)

 

> Data Set problems (problem on 2 separate sets)

 

> PCI card firewire/SCSI conflict (disconnected firewire drive)

 

> Tape Drive firmware (updated to latest)

 

>

 

>

 

> Here are the stats -

 

> Running Mac OS 9.1 on a beige G3 tower

 

> Retrospect 4.3 at 40 Meg of memory

 

> Catalog is pretty big, about 800 MB for 34 VXA 33/66 tapes.

 

>

 

> I am open to suggestions and WAGs. Thanks.

 

>

 

>

 

> Dennis Kane