Backing up almost 100 TB to tape

[mtav]

Hello,

in an environment about 100 TB "old" data exists and about 30 GB of new data is produced per day. For the 30 GB per day i wanted to create a job that does an incremental file backup to tape each day.

But about one time each year i would like to make a full backup of the 100 TB + all new data and then put those tapes in a safe. Has anyone done something similar? I understand the yearly backup will take a few days to run and also restore would take very long but i dont know what would be a better option if i want to store this data offline in a safe or similar.

[david.domask]

Hi mtav,

Just to confirm, you plan to send 100 TB worth of files and directories directly to tape, or you plan to do disk backups of the servers first and put the server backups on tape?

File to Tape has system requirement considerations for large amounts of files and directories, so what you're backing up specifically is important.

Similarly, what is the source server for this data? If the source storage supports NDMP, this may be a better option for the yearly backups as opposed to putting the files on tape directly, but naturally this depends on what your storage offers.

Each method is viable, but with large amounts of files/directories directly to tape, you need to do some planning, and a disk based backup of the data moved to tape may be easier to manage for the Yearlies.

[mtav]

Hello, my first intention was to directly backup up the files / directories. But making a backup to disk job first indeed might be easier, however we need a lot of extra disk space in this server then.

[david.domask]

Got it, I think the main concern is ensure you're sized properly on VBR + Tape server + Configuration Database server as per the User Guide link I posted previously. The total number of Directories and Files is quite important as you need to plan based around this.

Do you have maybe an estimate on total number of directories/files?

[mtav]

Hello, i cannot say for sure, but its mostly quite small files and probably a few 100 mio of them.

[david.domask]

Got it, the count is what matters most, I would check it, if it's some NAS filer, often there is a statistic on this, but you will need to accommodate for the system requirement increase as noted above it sounds like.