Since the 700 series filers only allow one SCSI backup device to be attached to a Filer how is it possible to back up 1TB of data in timely manner. I am talking about backing up in a 8 to 12 hour time frame.
Any ideas would be great.
I think about this question a lot. All day. Sometimes at night, too.
First, there is only one SCSI tape card allowed, but I know we use two drives daisy chained off of that card (no more than 2 drives, but 2 definitely).
My ideas: 1) Break your 1TB into some number of qtrees or subdirectories that you back up. Each night you could back up a 200GB tree (qtrees will give you better dump performance than regular old subtrees).
2) Use incrementals to further reduce the amount of time/tape you need to use. I know management becomes more of a headache, so maybe you want to invest in backup software that supports NDMP.
The time to do an incremental will be significantly less than the time to do a full backup. It will spend about the same amount of time doing the file system traversal as a level 0, but assuming a reasonable rate of file system change - you should be able to save time on the actual data dumping.
3) If you're really gung-ho about getting more than 2 dumps running at a time on a filer, your could use the NDMP 3-way backup functionality to run 2 dumps to a remote filer's tape drives in addition to the 2 dumps running on your local tape drive. Of course, your 3-way backup will tend to be quite a bit slower than a local backup.
Do any of these sound interesting to you?
I know Paul Norman reads these. Any news on supporting more tape adapters, Paul?
Stephen Manley FS Recovery