Linux FLR Restore Performance

[captainflannel]

I've been continuously tweaking our large linux VM backup/restore jobs. These VMs are 10TB+ and I've seen something odd with respect to restoring via FLR for these linux machines. Once we've mounted and can browse the guest file image I get very different restore speeds with the options of "Restore_KEEP" versus "Copy to.."

For example I'll run the same restore
B&R 8.0.0.2084 (latest)
Sample restore is 3GB with about 10,000 files/folders. Backup repository is a physical Linux machine with enterprise DAS storage.

When choosing the "Restore and Keep" option, the restore process takes about 2.5 hours
When choosing the "Copy to" option and select the original Linux VM and browse to the same folder path, (creating a new folder for my tests) the restore process takes about 45 minutes. With this option there is a long pause where it is gathering information, I assume their is some process pre-calculating all of the files to perform the copy/restore but not really sure. If this is some kind of pre-calculation that that my explain the performance difference.

Just curious if anyone has similar experiences, or perhaps I'm doing something wrong?

[Gostev]

Could you please try the same test with v9, as it had many improvements around Linux FLR performance specifically. Thanks!

[captainflannel]

Was a little put off by the quick recommendation to just try the latest build, but I just ran through the upgrade and needed to post these results. Same tests running the restore, wow what a difference.

30GB of about 10,000 files/folders from a Linux LVM Virtual machine.
B&R - 9.0.0.902
"Restore but Keep" took only 18 minutes, before it took 2.5 hours!!
"Copy to ..." took 30 minutes, before it took 45 minutes

Really amazing improvement here, not really sure what has changed, didnt see anything in the release notes. I'm really excited and happy to be able to finally feel confident to use VEEAM as a viable backup/restore solution for our large scale Linux file servers, finally! Awesome work there on whatever created this massive improvement.

[Gostev]

Nice!

And thanks a lot for taking time to post the detailed results, as it is incredibly useful for us to have numbers from side by side comparison between versions on the same data set from the real-world environment.

There was some major rework of FLR engine in v9, and perhaps you just missed this piece, but we did mention in the What's New in v9 document:

File-Level Recovery
• Engine optimizations. Multiple under-the-hood improvements are designed to significantly speed up both Windows and Linux FLR initialization and actual recovery performance.