Increased backup and restoration time - CPIO vs. fBackup

[iphy onibuje]

hello guys,
i am currently using CPIO for our commands,my DLT 8000 Tape Drive gives me a transfer data rate of 7Mb/s (supposed to be 6Mb/s native, 12Mb/s compressed), with approx. 2.28:1 compression after using the script based compression test utility. I am backing up a capacity of approx 30GB, but my backup time is real slow, it takes me 5 and half hours to backup. What do you suggest? would appreciate any ideas to help speed up my backup time to about 30mins to 1hr. Also which is better, CPIO vs. fBackup?

regards
iphy onibuje

[Stefan Farrelly]

fbackup is far better. Uses variable record sizes, and you can specify a config file to aid backup time and/or restore time. We use fbackup only. On our DLT8000's using fbackup we get a pretty constant 9.7MB/s (35 GB/Hr). Using fbackup, as long as your DLT is on a SCSI bus of its own, you should be able to get your backup down to just under an hour (50-55 mins).

We use the following optimized fbackup config file;

blocksperrecord 128
records 32
checkpointfreq 256
readerprocesses 4
maxretries 1
retrylimit 0
maxvoluses 1000

[Michael Steele_2]

Can't port 'fbackup' to other non-hp system since it's HP proprietary.

'fbackup' spawns multiple processes and becomes 'multithreaded' which increases performance.

'fbackup' will list bad file entries if the file is open during backup.

Finally, cpio use to have a 2 gb file limitation. I recently saw that it was corrected but I can't find a referenced. So bear this in mind that it may still be a problem.