Tape Backups

For the last few weeks I was having fits with our backup system, primarily our Sony AIT-3 tape backup drive. We use EMC Retrospect to perform disk to disk to tape backups. We backup nightly to disk and then transfer a weekly snapshot for disaster recovery. Well our tape transfers started to take 22 plus hours to complete and consumed 4 100/260GB tapes. We finally bit the bullet and purchased an HP Ultrium 920 400/800GB 1/8 autoloader. What a difference it made. Now tape transfers can occur without any human intervention and since this drive is faster backups take about 15 hours to complete. I thought that was I little slow so I am doing some performance tuning on the backup server and did discover one interesting tidbit below

 

As you can see my SATA storage array was very fragmented. I ran the Windows Disk Defragmenter on the array but it did not touch the fragmentation we were seeing on the array even with 26% free space. Here were the stats after the first defrag run

 

As you can see some of the backup image files were very fragmented. 4800 fragments in a 600MB file is horrible. I went ahead and installed the Diskeeper 2008 trial and performed a full defragmentation job after completing my next disk to tape transfer took about 12 hours to complete a 17% increase in performance. I still have some tuning to complete but this was a great start.

Comments

[Beats by dr dre headphones]

Why would it take FOUR hours on the phone with Microsoft. Why does it always take so long???