TLReed Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 Hi, We're in the process of upgrading our network and mulling over alternative backup solutions. We're gointg to have a potential terabyte of data on an xserve with a RAID drive, plus we'll have a win2k server that can do backups of the xserve and up to 70 workstations. One suggestion a vendor gave to me was to put a RAID volume on the win2k box and do a backup-to-disk storage set from the xserve RAID to the win2k server RAID. This would be incremental backups throughout the day, plus streamiing of multiple workstation backups. Then the backup would be streaming from the win2k RAID to a tape drive. The advantages would be that the xserve would be doing small incrementals to the backup RAID, which would be fast and keep network traffic low. Then the backup RAID could stream data to the tape drive, keeping the data flowing quickly and efficiently without bogging the network. I'm told the RAID backup to disk would rewrite the disk in Retrospect's proprietary small file packet format. Each time an incremental backup happens from the xserve, only the changed packets will be modified. When the tape drive streams data from the backup RAID, only those changed file packets will be added to a normal backup. The only problem wiith this scenario is having a backup RAID solely to stage data to the tape drive is an expensive outlay. I'm thinking I can install a JBOD to do this, either internally or externally, perhaps using firewire. Anyone got any gotchas, warnings, success stories or portents to share about this. I'm not clear my picture of this strategy is correct in any event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tremblyj Posted June 8, 2004 Report Share Posted June 8, 2004 Hi, We just switched our strategy to Disk to Disk to Tape. We have dual 146MB 10k SCSI hard drives inside an IBM xServer 335 (rack-mounted pizza box with a single Pentium4 2.5 GHZ ZEON CPU and 1GB RAM connected via a 100MB/s ethernet port running Win2k server) striped together using the built-in hardware RAID controller. The data and Retrospect config files are backed up to a 200GB local partition with 8 scripts which run concurrently (maximum of 8 execution units allowed in MultiServer 6.5 for Windows with powerful hardware). When all eight scripts have completed. A special script called a Tape Transfer is run and the backup sets are transferred to our DLT8000 tape drive using a separate SCSI card. As the Tape Transfer script runs, it creates a catalog file which we can used to restore directly from tape. The gotcha here is that each time the Tape Transfer script runs, it overwrites the previous catalog file which has the same name as the Tape Transfer script. What we did is use the RetroEventHandler.bat file that we were already using to email backup logs to ourselves (which list our client backup failures) and to email us when Retrospect wants another tape. We added a section to copy the Tape Transfer catalog to a different directory while renaming it to include the date and time in the filename. Now we're trying to find out how to manually initiate the Tape Transfer script from the RetroEventHandler.bat file after all of our eight backup scripts are finished and we're also trying to figure out how to get the RetroEventHandler.bat file not to pop up overtop of Retrospect everytime an event triggers it. -John Trembly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tremblyj Posted June 8, 2004 Report Share Posted June 8, 2004 Hi, Check my post in "Strategy, Scripts and General Use" concerning your post. -John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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