Hi!

Thanks for the info! Scary stuff this backup! I have just checked the logs to find that the backup ran for 32 hours this weekend!

Anyway, How have you achived the spliting of your file system? I think this is going to cause us problems due to the rather unitelligent autoloader we use to drive the backup...any advise on this?

Simon


-----Original Message-----
From: Marion Hakanson [mailto:hakanson@cse.ogi.edu]
Sent: 01 September 2000 18:24
To: Clawson, Simon
Cc: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: Budtool woes


> . . .
> I am bacing up a single volume filer with nearly 200GB of data - my backup
> is constanlty failing due to the process running out of time..anyone seen
> this? Is there a way round it? Can I increse the allowable time? Can I split
> the backup into several levels?
> . . .


Simon,

I see that you've probably solved your timeout problem, but you've
probably got another problem as well.  I've just upgraded to bt-4.6.1a,
and the Release Notes state that it does not support backups that get
split across more than 3 tapes.

I'll spare you the details right now, since you can go look at my
original posting to "toasters" on this topic:
  http://teaparty.mathworks.com:1999/toasters/6612.html

Apparently a large backup of this type will work fine, but you may
not be able to do recoveries from it, under certain mysterious
circumstances (which I've not yet experienced, thankfully).

The workaround is to break up that single backup into backups of
subdirectories of that large volume (you don't have to breakup
the volume itself).  Solaris ufsdump can do this, but doesn't support
incremental (non-full) dumps of subdirectories;  Fortunately (by the
tests I've done here), NetApp's dump (both console/cmd-line and NDMP)
can do both fulls and incrementals of subdirectories.

I've since noticed that NetApp themselves recommend against backing
up large volumes (>100GB) in a single "dump" run.  Here's where:

  http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel536r2/html/sag/dump7.htm


Luckily for us, our large volume (185GB, currently) is broken up into
about ten qtrees & a couple other directories.  I think the 10-12 dumps
actually complete slightly faster than the previous single large dump.

BTW, how's it going in your search for a BudTool replacement?  A PDC
engineer told me that the new Legato Networker 6.0 NDMP support will
only do backups to either a NetApp-attached library, or to another NDMP
enabled system (and _not_ to a Networker media server).  It doesn't
support a split-library configuration at all (which is what we have
our BudTool/NetApp setup doing).  Because of that, they want to sell
me Veritas NetBackup instead.

I've got a few other leads in the works, and I'd be happy to compare
notes on what you've found so far.

Good luck and regards,

--
Marion Hakanson <hakanson@cse.ogi.edu>
CSE Computing Facilities