Get a new backup software? The problem is that some vendors do not support Direct Access Restore, meaning it will search through every tape starting at the first and scan the whole thing. If no DAR, you're basically bummed.

Do you use snapshots? If you have the space it is a life-saver at times.

~JK

Don.Hickey@alcatel.com wrote:

I find restoring from a tape extraordinarly slowwwww. I have home directories on a clustered pair of F840 running 6.1.1r2. I have several volumes at about 300gb usable. When I need to restore a file from a users directory it can take up to 6+ hours (DLT 8000). It appears most of the time is taken searching for the files... is there anything you can suggest (including any white papers) to speed up this process?

thanks again

Don

NetBackup doesn't support DAR which would help with the speed of your restores. And NetBackup 4.5 supposedly doesn't support it either.

You could break your backups into smaller chunks (do individual directories or qtrees instead of volumes). Or switch to software that does support DAR.

We use NetBackup but the speed for restores isn't that much of an issue for us.