Hello Bojan,
I've just taken a look at the Windows dedup API, and it is clear that a
non-Microsoft aware backup program is not going to work. As with
everything else that Microsoft does, this API is at least 10 times as
complicated as I could ever imagine. Unfortunately, given the complexity
Bacula is unlikely to get code to implement handling deduplication
volumes for some time :-( One needs an army of programmers to do
this sort of implementation ...
Best regards,
Kern
On 08/16/2013 10:32 PM, Bojan Zdrnja (SANS ISC) wrote:
Hi Kern,
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 5:40 PM, Kern Sibbald <k...@sibbald.com
<mailto:k...@sibbald.com>> wrote:
Hello,
This sounds like an interesting problem, and yet another
incompatibility or
complication thrown in by Microsoft. I am aware of their new
deduplication
feature (the press seems pretty unenthusiastic about it), but if
it requires
changes to backup programs, Bacula including the Bacula Enterprise one
for sale will be totally ignorant of these changes, so please
don't spend your
money for nothing (though it is a very small price).
Can you explain to me why the size of the files are listed as 0
bytes? Any
reasonable underlying OS deduplication system should be totally
transparent
to application programs or service programs such as Bacula, so I
don't see
why the sizes would be zero. It sounds like Microsoft requires
the application
to do something special to have the files rehydrated -- if so, it
is one of their
worst farces since Vista.
So, an update for everyone.
This is definitely caused by deduplication. I have two Windows 2012
servers in a DFS cluster and deduplication was turned on on both of them.
Couple of days after I posted this, on one of the servers I turned off
deduplication (since it really has enough disk and I don't actually
need deduplication there).
After turning off deduplication nothing really happens initially on
the server (the old files are still deduplicated) so I had to run a
job to do that:
Start-DedupJob -Verbose -Type Unoptimization -Volume D:
After couple of hours the system deduplicates all files.
I started Bacula again and the backup worked flawlessly. So my
conclusion is that it definitely doesn't support deduplication in
Windows 2012.
I read some articles about it and I would say that you definitely need
to do something special with the files, besides VSS.
I presume that the current Bacula client on Windows does not do it --
and from some reading it appears that other backup solutions
(commercial products) have similar issues.
At the moment I'm running backup from one DFS node which has the files
deduplicated and everything works ok. The other node is not backed up.
Cheers,
Bojan
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get 100% visibility into Java/.NET code with AppDynamics Lite!
It's a free troubleshooting tool designed for production.
Get down to code-level detail for bottlenecks, with <2% overhead.
Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes.
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48897031&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
