Need Advice on Large Filesystem Backup

[rklingaman]

We currently have 3 file-system servers, at the moment they backup up separately and alone with the following sizes:

1013 GB
814 GB
246 GB

Most of the other jobs I have with the smaller servers I have grouped together to get a nice dedupe ratio but I'm worried about these three servers if I group them on the size of that backup file. We also write the files to a tape library every day with Bakbone Netvault.

The backup server is a standalone server running Windows 2008 R2 64bit

Should I group them? How much size do you think I will save? Will I run into problems with that big of a file?

Thanks,

Ryan

[Gostev]

Hi Ryan,

Assuming these servers have random data, you will only save about 10-20GB by grouping them (block occupied by OS files). But since data is typically not random, there will be dedupe between blocks backing actual files to.

I would group them in all cases, yes full backup will take a while, but incremental backups typically fly on file servers with changed block tracking (assuming typical workload I would expect from big file servers, with not too much data changing every day).

Thanks!

[rklingaman]

Thanks for the reply. Do you know if any problems lets say at worse case if I get a 2TB file on the server?

[Gostev]

What do you mean?

[rklingaman]

When I group the servers and back them up I will get (at worse case) a 2 TB .vbk file that I will have to copy to tape. It will be no bigger overall than I currently copy off site it will be just one file. I wasn't sure how windows would handle the 2TB file and if it would cause any problems with it.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ryan, I'm pretty sure it should work quite well no matter how large your VBK file is, though you should remember about max file limitations for NTFS systems.

[Gostev]

Maximum NTFS file size is 16TB.