I wish we could do that... but we have offsite requirements that we just can't get away from, along with data retention requirements. We just got asked for a restore of email from 2001... which ain't too likely to actually happen. LOL.
tmac> We killed those backups. After review, we determined if we had tmac> to, we could request and reconstitute the data from another tmac> source. We ended up just backing up our intellectual property tmac> which took minutes and only a few tapes....until we retired an tmac> older system. Then we made it the "backup" and snapmirrored the tmac> important stuff to it...got rid of tapes!
tmac> --tmac
tmac> Tim McCarthy, Principal Consultant
tmac> Proud Member of the #NetAppATeam
tmac> I Blog at TMACsRack
tmac> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 8:51 PM, John Stoffel john@stoffel.org wrote:
Tim> Yepper. On volumes with lots of files, that ndmp history/catalog Tim> pass can be crazy!
tmac> Hah! We've got a volume with 50 million files and it sucks for NDMP tmac> backups. Fulls are actually not terrible... but the index pass just tmac> takes forever.
Tim> I once tried to use ndmp backup on a volume with 500,000+ Tim> files. After 8 hours and a huge load (FAS6080) the ndmp gave out Tim> and quit. Eight hours of building the index and it didn't finish.
tmac> This is the probably with *any* file level backup. Unfortunately, tmac> there's no good solution in terms of price for backing up Netapps that tmac> I'm aware of.
tmac> You could buy a cheaper pair of heads with lots and lots of cheap(ish) tmac> SATA storage, but it's still god-awful expensive. And the snapmirror tmac> licenses aren't cheap either.
tmac> In my engineering environments, I've been trying to encourage them to tmac> only backup what they need, and to work in scratch areas instead, but tmac> it's hard to get people to change.
tmac> The Netapp is just so reliable that is really does keep data for years tmac> and years without problems. In more cases.
tmac> Heh.
tmac> But some $WORK orgs have off-site requirements, and they're not tmac> willing to pay the price for a remote co-lo Netapp and storage and the tmac> bandwidth to make backups work reliably and quickly enough. So off to tmac> tape it is. Make's JSOX happy too...