BackUp device for local or colo storage
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Dashrender So if something should happen to the vDISK on XS. That we have a way to simply import a 2TB file to the server, and turn it on.
Trying to K.I.S.S
Can't you get that from the StorageCraft system?
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Not effectively (at least with what we have).
Fulls currently take over 24 hours to generate when their needed. So fulls are almost never taken.
But our system partitions are ignored, besides 2 servers.
I want to include everything in the backup process. So everything is protected.
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I'd say your two separate backup solutions aren't very simple. One extra thing that can fail. One extra thing to maintain/mange.
StorageCraft for daily incrementals
and home built solution for weekly fulls.Maybe StorageCraft can actually create the tapes for you?
I know when I was looking at Backup Exec it could. It would pull incrementals daily, then it could spin down full backups to tape on whatever schedule you wanted. It would create a virtual full backup at that given point in time and that is what was backed up to tape.
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Incremental changes can be written to local onsite storage, but this doesn't include recovery options for "everything" just the system changes from the past 3 (but should be 7 days).
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@Dashrender said:
and home built solution for weekly fulls.
I might be being mean to NAUBackup, calling it home built.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Fulls currently take over 24 hours to generate when their needed. So fulls are almost never taken.
It takes 24 hours to generate a full backup from StorageCraft? Why? What's the hold up?
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@Dashrender said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Fulls currently take over 24 hours to generate when their needed. So fulls are almost never taken.
It takes 24 hours to generate a full backup from StorageCraft? Why? What's the hold up?
Yeah, this seems like a major problem. If it takes that long to take a backup, what's the restore process look like?
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@scottalanmiller We've never had to perform a full restore thank god.
But I'd imagine that it's awful.
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This is also why we really only perform hourly incremental backups currently.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller We've never had to perform a full restore thank god.
But I'd imagine that it's awful.
And it is the reason that backups exist in the first place
If restoring a full is bad, imagine having to restore a full plus an incremental!
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When you said it took 24 hours to generate - I thought you mean to do a restore, but after reading your comments, it takes 24 hours to take a backup?
Oh man - WHY? I'd look into fixing that problem, or ditching the StorageCraft all together. In keeping with your own desire to K.I.S.S. I don't see you have any other choice.
From here it looks like you're trying to solve one problem by throwing another solution at it instead of fixing the problem.
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OK So dropping the idea of full backups.
What would you guys recommend? A single full backup of the XS VM's pre-data, and then use Storage Craft for the daily incremental backups?
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If your OS's really don't matter, and they are only serving the purpose of file server - then that might work. Setup your main OS install, create all of your shares, then create images of the OS and boot drives. Then backup the data drives as desired.
But if you application settings that need to be backed up regularly that live on the OS drive, why not an incremental forever solution, once your StorageCraft performance problem is solved? Then you can replicate your StorageCraft to another site, only replicating the daily changes.
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Let's back up and drop all of it. And start from the beginning....
Why is StorageCraft taking so long to take a backup?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Let's back up and drop all of it. And start from the beginning....
Why is StorageCraft taking so long to take a backup?
It takes forever to backup when creating a full. So ~6TB of live systems.
Also ask the MSP who set it up.... before my time and I barely touch it.
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@DustinB3403 said:
It takes forever to backup when creating a full. So ~6TB of live systems.
Also ask the MSP who set it up.... before my time and I barely touch it.
I think that everything has to be focused here. This is the problem, this has to be fixed before you can address other issues.
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Can you work to solve that problem?
What can you tell us about that system? Is it on 1 Gb network? Same switch as the VM hosts? How many network connections does it have?
Are the disks on the VM hosts IOPs overloaded? Do they have any to spare for backups?
Are you doing backups now to NAUBackup? If so, how long do they take to finish? What's doing the processing for the NAUBackup, the VM host (XenServer?) or the data repository that holding the full backups?
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You need to identify the bottlenecks on the backup system. Something is taking a really long time. Is it the target, is it the backup server, is it the source systems...
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iSCSI Buffalo drive attached to a Server 2008 file server with 1Gbe NIC (single) which backups to a 2 and 4 drive Synology devices.
Each synology backup different items.
We also have an ancient "archive server" which has 6 drives, running Server 2003 which actually runs the Storage Craft software. Single NIC connected, 1Gbe, 8GB RAM with a Quad Core AMD Opteron 1385 CPU.
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No wonder you have issues!
So the iSCSI traffic for the Buffalo goes over the same NIC as the traffic being sent to the 2 Synology devices?
And it's all driven by the StorageCraft software that's running on the Server 2003 box?
What does the Buffalo device do that's different than the 2 Synology devices?
Is the Buffalo the primary storage, boot storage, etc, for the Server 2008?
