Backing up 1000's of small files with Data Protector Express

[Grant Cohn]

Greetings....

Anyone have any tips on tuning / configuring DP Express (Ver 3.1 SP4) to increase speed when backing up many small (0kb to 100kb) files. Currently its taking me up to 10 hours to backup 22000 of these horrible small files. If I TAR them first, the 5Gb files backs up in 5 minutes!

Thanks
Grant,

[D Lancaster]

Hi Grant,

You have discovered the performance nightmare of every backup and recovery app -thousands of small files. Unfortunately, all of the overhead necessary for each individual file will overtax any app.

You didn't give many hints to your installation but if you are running the full product and not just the Single Server Edition that came with your tape drive you might try creating a Virtual Tape Library. Do the backup there first and then copy the backup to tape. If you have the D2D2Any option you can automate the process.

Also, as you have discovered, if you only need archive and have a low probability of needing to restore a single file, you can tar the small data files first and then backup the tarred file.

Dave