On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 4:24 PM, <rusty.ma...@sungard.com> wrote: > > We have a NetApp filer that has a few TB of data made up largely of > millions of small files (about 30 million or so) and we are using several > NDMP policies to back up this data. The two main problems are length of time > it takes to backup (we usually have 2-3 backups running all day every day) > and when there is a maintenance or other event in the NBU domain, we have to > kill the job, resulting in having to start all over (no checkpoints). > > For those of you who have faced a similar situation, how are you backing up > this data?
> Current thoughts are moving away from NDMP and going with just snapshots > and then getting the snap offsite either by backing it up or replicating it. > We've also thought about backing it up via NFS, but that will probably be > slower, though we would get checkpoints. > I feel your pain. We lived (and died) by FlashBackup and now that we've migrated a lot of data to NetApp, we're running into the same issues. We've gone to a fair amount of snapshots combined with snapmirror to offsite locations. This has the added advantage of making the data more available than it would be via tape recovery but it can make it harder to find data (user: "back sometime in May, this file existed somewhere down this directory tree, and it might have been named something like this"). We haven't found a perfect method yet - all options seem to suck somehow or other. Backing it up via NFS is actually not a bad option and some people are proponents of this. Back it up once to a PureDisk storage unit and then do continuous incrementals and synthetics (which only moves pointers around within PureDisk). For a few TB, it might be affordable. For multiple 20TB applications, that can get a bit (or a LOT) pricey. If you can avoid the subsequent fulls and the data doesn't change much, this approach might work for you. If it turns over regularly, this isn't going to be great either. Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE ewi...@ewilts.org Linkedin <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ewilts>
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