Super slow restore - Is incremental restore possible?

[SeanGraham]

Hello everyone,

I have, what I gather, is a common problem. My restores are ridiculously slow.

We are trying to do a DR exercise, and we have 2 VMs (Windows Domain Controller + RDS) on a vSphere ESXi install. Everything runs great, and the backups are reasonably fast (~125MB/sec).

When restoring to a different machine, however, it's painfully slow - about 15MB/sec. It took about a day to do a 1.1TB restore. It's restoring to a 2TB HD, and changing from thick provisioning to thin provisioning. I know that'll have some overhead, but this is significant.

I'm not sure if anything can be done to speed that up?

I have not yet tried the instant restore, I know that's an option, but I can imagine that it'll be significantly slower than a proper native restore. I'll play with this as well, but the other piece that I'm wondering is - is it possible to do an incremental restore?

We do monthly full backups, and daily incrementals. Can I restore the monthly ahead of time, then in an emergency only "catch up" with the incrementals? Very little data changes on a daily basis (about 10GB), and most of it is overlapped. There may only be 50GB changed over the course of the month.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[foggy]

There's a Quick Rollback option available, however, for restores to the original location only. I recommend contacting support for a closer look - logs will tell the actual bottleneck during restore so you will be able to optimize things.