Have you looked into Snapmirror to tape for your backups? You lose on incrementials, but that may not be a big deal for you. It's a block level backup of the entire volume. Might help speed things up.
-Blake
On 8/31/06, Carl Howell chowell@uwf.edu wrote:
Why not break the mirror change the minra setting and give it a go? You should know pretty quickly if it makes any difference. Our backup config is the same as yours, and we have a couple of volumes with millions of files that are also slow to backup.
- Carl
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Peter D. Gray Sent: Thu 8/31/2006 6:53 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: when to use minra ?
Thanks for the replies. Some background on this question.
I have 2 filers used for email storage (NFS, attached to 2 mirapoint mail stores). They have lots of small files. I am mirroring these 2 filers to an R200 for backup, but I also take tape copies via NDMP every 30 days or so. The volumes contain about 350GB each of actual data, excluding snapshots, and 5 million files.
My NDMP tape backups from the R200 are pretty slow. I average about 2 MBytes per sec. Note that backups of other volumes on te R200 work really well, so there is no problem on the R200 or the network.
I saw the comment that turning off minra can have a big impact on backup performance so I thought I would try it. But discovered that the setting would have to be changed on the mirror source which is not so good (maybe).
It would be nice if that setting could be changed on the mirror target but not the source, but I can see why that not possible.
So, I wondered if I could justify setting minra on on the source volumes but would need some way to predict the impact.
It sounds like turing on minra is not usually a good idea, so I guess I am stuck with slow NDMP backups.
Just out of interest, does anybody understand why minra has an impact on backup speed. I assume the read ahead does not go past end of file but that is the only explanation I can think of as to why it would have an impact?
Regards, pdg
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