I presume u are using tar?! From My experience, 17gigs of a (few) large files does not take a long time. On the other hand, backing up a large amount of files in a (single) directory takes a long time. The orig tar that came with this (linux) sys readily reached 80% cpu usage. The later tar fixed that, so now it still takes a long time ( but mainly it just waits for all the disk/directory activity ?! )
So whats the culprit? Since there are 2 phases ( size estimate, and then data transfer ) i suspect that each part takes about 4 hours.To find out, you can do a "time tar cf - ...... " just like what the sendsize program would do on your system. just to See how long that takes. Then how fast is your tape drive? a 5.0mb/sec tape drive would take 56 min just to back up 17gig. This presumes that the tape is screaming ( i ment streaming ) . a "df -i" might help in determing how many files might be out on the system. David Flood wrote: > > We kick off our backup at 10pm at the moment we are only > backing up 4 seperate directorys i.e. 4 seperate disklist entries. > These are estimated by amanda to be 17.4GB. The estimates are > taking just short of 8 hours to complete which is unacceptable. > This is after making every dump a full dump in an attempt to cut > down time with doing estimates for level 1 & 2. To force it to do full > dumps I have did the following in amanda.conf: > > dumpcycle 0 > strategey noinc > skip-incr yes > > I'm running: > amanda 2.4.3b3 > Solaris 7 > Using tar > I'm restore onto a 35/70 DLT with software compression. > > The 4 directorys mentioned above are all on the tapeserver and > those are the only thing the tapeserver is backing up. > > Does anyone have any ideas, because the estimates are taking so > long the backups are still running when the users come in - in the > morning. This means the backups I'm getting if I get them are 'dirty' > not to mention it slows the system down as backups and users are > trying to access the same data. > > Thanks in advance > > David Flood > Systems Administrator
