A Quick-Guide Article to Reducing Backup Times
Poster: SySAdmin
Posted on August 9, 2011 at 10:28:01 AM
A Quick-Guide Article to Reducing Backup Times
LONDON, August 9, 2011/PRNewswire/ --
Though backup software vendors continue making advancements in
technology to speed up the process, the time it takes to backup can still be
very time consuming for many IT managers today. A recent survey conducted by
Vanson Bourne on 1,000 UK companies suggested businesses are on average
backing up to tape once a month, with one rather alarming statistic from the
same survey showing 10 percent were only backing up to tape once per year.
This infrequency of backup could realistically be strongly attributable
to the time factor involved. Likely, many companies would run their backups
on Friday evenings, in the hope for it to be completed by Monday business
start. But with such large data pools, these backups might not complete in
time, and can therefore often be postponed for larger time frames.
Three Important Backup Time Factors
Backup solutions use different techniques - they could be file level,
where the files are searched through and copied to the backup media, or
block level backups which go further and copy the underlying file system
'the actual blocks' on the disk. Regardless of the technique in use, the
backup times will also depend on other factors like available
bandwidth/throughput, the media in use and/or how badly fragmented the
drives are.
1. Bandwidth
Bandwidth measured as bits/s is the maximum throughput of a logical or
physical communication path between devices in a digital network.
Essentially the more bandwidth or better throughput you have the quicker it
takes for the backup jobs to complete.
2. Backup Media
There are numerous backup media available today: Magnetic tapes, hard
disk and remote backup service. The Magnetic tape is the preferred media for
bulk backups and archiving, although the access times are poor since they
are sequential access devices, it is preferred due to the cost ratio and
it's been available for a long time. Backups to other devices like hard disk
and remote backups through broadband internet access would essentially mean
the backups complete faster.
3.Fragmentation
Along with the above mentioned factors fragmentation can cause a severe
negative impact on the backup time. The more fragmented the files are the
longer it takes for them to be copied to the media, as the blocks are out of
sequence and the resulting excess I/Os generated can also cause a negative
effect. Defragmenting the volume completely before the backups start, has
proven to dramatically reduce the backup times - in some case by half.
Didier Guieu, System-Architecture Engineer at HSBC France, commented,
"The data and files access times were taking far too long. We noticed that
when the server was fragmented, the backup time sometimes needed twice as
long to run."
Also new technologies like de-duplication, copy on write and shadow copy
solutions are becoming common. If you have such solutions, be sure to choose
a business class defragmenter with disk and data growth prevention
technologies in place such as that found in Diskeeper(R) performance
software (http://www.diskeeper.com).
Taking into accounts these key-points, you should be able to
dramatically decrease your backup times.
Source: Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Scott Thomas ? +44(0)1293-763-406
LONDON, August 9, 2011/PRNewswire/ --
Though backup software vendors continue making advancements in
technology to speed up the process, the time it takes to backup can still be
very time consuming for many IT managers today. A recent survey conducted by
Vanson Bourne on 1,000 UK companies suggested businesses are on average
backing up to tape once a month, with one rather alarming statistic from the
same survey showing 10 percent were only backing up to tape once per year.
This infrequency of backup could realistically be strongly attributable
to the time factor involved. Likely, many companies would run their backups
on Friday evenings, in the hope for it to be completed by Monday business
start. But with such large data pools, these backups might not complete in
time, and can therefore often be postponed for larger time frames.
Three Important Backup Time Factors
Backup solutions use different techniques - they could be file level,
where the files are searched through and copied to the backup media, or
block level backups which go further and copy the underlying file system
'the actual blocks' on the disk. Regardless of the technique in use, the
backup times will also depend on other factors like available
bandwidth/throughput, the media in use and/or how badly fragmented the
drives are.
1. Bandwidth
Bandwidth measured as bits/s is the maximum throughput of a logical or
physical communication path between devices in a digital network.
Essentially the more bandwidth or better throughput you have the quicker it
takes for the backup jobs to complete.
2. Backup Media
There are numerous backup media available today: Magnetic tapes, hard
disk and remote backup service. The Magnetic tape is the preferred media for
bulk backups and archiving, although the access times are poor since they
are sequential access devices, it is preferred due to the cost ratio and
it's been available for a long time. Backups to other devices like hard disk
and remote backups through broadband internet access would essentially mean
the backups complete faster.
3.Fragmentation
Along with the above mentioned factors fragmentation can cause a severe
negative impact on the backup time. The more fragmented the files are the
longer it takes for them to be copied to the media, as the blocks are out of
sequence and the resulting excess I/Os generated can also cause a negative
effect. Defragmenting the volume completely before the backups start, has
proven to dramatically reduce the backup times - in some case by half.
Didier Guieu, System-Architecture Engineer at HSBC France, commented,
"The data and files access times were taking far too long. We noticed that
when the server was fragmented, the backup time sometimes needed twice as
long to run."
Also new technologies like de-duplication, copy on write and shadow copy
solutions are becoming common. If you have such solutions, be sure to choose
a business class defragmenter with disk and data growth prevention
technologies in place such as that found in Diskeeper(R) performance
software (http://www.diskeeper.com).
Taking into accounts these key-points, you should be able to
dramatically decrease your backup times.
Source: Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Scott Thomas ? +44(0)1293-763-406