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Block Level Backup

 
IngramS
Occasional Contributor

Block Level Backup

I'm currently using Backup Exec as my software platform for running my tape backups. This product does a file level backup and, due to the nature of the data at my site, is very slow at writing those files to my LTO4 tape drive. Is there an alternative backup software that would read the entire server volume as ones and zeros and write that to tape? I understand that I would need to have the same amount of free space available any time that I needed to do a restore, but if the tape drive did not have to pause and backup for all of the individual file stops, I would be able to complete all of my backups in a much smaller time window.

 

I have used the HP Tape Tools program to test all of the hardware involved and, using the ideal situations that it provides, I do get the +600GB per hour performance that is advertised for the LTO4 library.

 

Current problem is a 2.2TB drive volume on a Windows 2003 R2 server with 1.2TB of data in 18 million files in 8900 folders that takes 25 hours to complete. This server has five volumes of similar proportions, so a full backup is taking almost a week to accomplish.

1 REPLY 1
thomasr
Respected Contributor

Re: Block Level Backup

You certainly seem to be running up against the filesystem performance limits.


HP's Data Protector ( http://www.hp.com/go/dataprotector ) can perform a disk-image backup.  You can download an eval copy with a 30-day full license from that site.    Perform a search in the help for "image backup" and it will walk you through the steps. 

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