Parallel dumps of a single file system?

[Paul Lussier]

Hi all,

I have a 1 TB RAID5 array which I inherited.  The previous admin configured it to be a single file system as well.  The disklist I have set up currently splits this file system up into multiple DLEs for backup purposes and dumps them using gtar.

In the past, on systems with multiple partitions, I would configure all file systems on different physical drives to be backed up in parallel.  Since this system has but 1 file system, I've been backing them up one at a time.
But since this is a RAID array, it really wouldn't matter whether this were many file systems or 1, since everything is RAIDed out across all disks, would it?

So, my question is this: Am I doing the right thing by dumping these DLEs serially, or can I dump them in parallel?

For example, I have my user directories split out like this in the disklist file:

  space-monster:/u1/user
  space-monster:/u1/user/ad
  space-monster:/u1/user/eh
  space-monster:/u1/user/il
  space-monster:/u1/user/mp
  space-monster:/u1/user/qt
  space-monster:/u1/user/uz

So, does it matter whether I have a RAID array with 1 or 23 file systems on it?  Am I going about this the correct way, or can I use some parallelism?

Thanks,
--
Paul