I'm looking into various methods for tape backup of our filers. Due to the large number of files a file level backup would be significantly slower than a block-level backup method, however I'm not sure if one exists. I was hoping someone could clarify. NDMP utilizes dump, which is file-based so that doesn't solve the performance issues, and from what I can tell SnapVault is only for disk-to-disk backup, not tape. Even if I direct connect a tape robot to the filer I'd still be using dump and the throughput isn't being limited by the network capacity, so that doesn't help either.
I'm hoping there is a block-level method I'm unaware of. NDMP in my tests has been dog slow and standard backups via NFS mount don't sound appealing.
Suggestions are welcome.
benr.