The more I learn about NTbackup, the more I realize that BE is a just a GUI wrapper for it...
________________________________ From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 9:46 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Comparing NT Backup speeds I've tried to avoid BE for several years now, but you used to be able to adjust the tape buffer size on an advanced property window. I know that's not much help, but I'm sure a little time digging on the BE support site would bring that to light... Or someone else may know. After I got into it, I found nothing that BE would do for me that NTbackup couldn't. And now, Windows Server Backup (with a couple of command line tools to deal with Exchange). Now, the enterprise class packages - Netbackup, CommVault, Legato, etc. - they are a different story. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Klint Price - ArizonaITPro [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:41 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Comparing NT Backup speeds any optimizations out there for BackupExec? Michael B. Smith wrote: I don't think you'll find any problems with it. The section below is showing its age. It was written before Microsoft moved to E12 and DPM and VSS. But it was accurate in the 2004 timeframe. NTBackup When people ask how Microsoft does their Exchange Server backups, most people are surprised to hear that Microsoft uses NTBackup. Often they don't think to ask the next question-what else do you use? NTBackup is used for the first level backup. This means that it generates the backups directly from Exchange Server and then places the backups onto other media. Microsoft backs up to disk for the first level backup. After backing up to disk, Microsoft then does a secondary dump to tape or to SAN, according to their internal backup rotation. This second and/or third level backup often uses other tools besides NTBackup. Until recently, Microsoft IT (the group inside Microsoft for maintaining their production servers) had a special version of NTBackup that wasn't available to the outside world. That version was made available as a hotfix to Windows Server 2003 (Microsoft KB 839272 (System performance is negatively affected when Ntbackup.exe writes to a destination .bkf file)) and is included in Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003. This change to NTBackup increases its speed significantly and decreases its performance impact on the server significantly. You can find detailed information about the process that Microsoft uses internally in the document named Backup Process Used with Clustered Exchange Server 2003 Servers at Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=63FA9270-563F-4627-A0A0-8A07E02CF9BF&displaylang=en (http://tinyurl.com/bcfhh). Despite the document name, the information in the document applies completely to non-clustered servers as well as to clustered servers (excepting only that clustered servers use clustered disk for the backup). This document describes the registry changes covered in the next section (which can improve performance) and provides practices for performing multiple parallel backups of information stores (as covered in the following sections). Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: HELP_PC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 2:08 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: R: Comparing NT Backup speeds I made the changes and even to disk the speed is doubled !I hope no issue or contras because it looks too easy ! GuidoElia HELPPC ________________________________ Da: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Inviato: martedì 7 ottobre 2008 22.55 A: NT System Admin Issues Oggetto: RE: Comparing NT Backup speeds Registry Changes for Optimizing NTBackup The first optimization to make for NTBackup performance is to change some registry keys that affect buffering. These changes can have a very positive impact on performance when writing to tape, and a smaller impact when writing to disk. They are as follows (in batch file syntax): reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Backup Engine" /v "Logical Disk Buffer Size" /t REG_SZ /d 64 /f reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Backup Engine" /v "Max Buffer Size" /t REG_SZ /d 1024 /f reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Backup Engine" /v "Max Num Tape Buffers" /t REG_SZ /d 16 /f These registry changes double the default values. Do note that they affect HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and not HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as you might expect. Therefore, you should execute NTBackup under the desired user to create the registry key before you attempt to set the above registry values. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Joseph L. Casale [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 11:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Comparing NT Backup speeds Michael, What are these tweaks you speak of? jlc From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 6:26 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Comparing NT Backup speeds Well a local device will usually be faster than a remote device. Ntbackup, with the registry tweaks, gives me about 1 GB per minute locally. But I don't have a dat-72 to compare to. My home GB LAN with a cheap crappy switch copies about 50 MB/min. So I'm thinking that two hours seems more likely than 9 hours. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: HELP_PC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 7:28 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: R: Comparing NT Backup speeds Yes the DAT device is local. Not applied registry tweaks GuidoElia HELPPC ________________________________ Da: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Inviato: martedì 7 ottobre 2008 13.05 A: NT System Admin Issues Oggetto: RE: Comparing NT Backup speeds Have you applied the "standard" registry tweaks to increase the ntbackup buffer size? Is the dat-72 locally attached? Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: HELP_PC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 1:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Comparing NT Backup speeds In a network 10/100/1000 copper a NT backup of the complete server to a Qnap device RAID-1 takes about 9 hours with verify (about 50GB) versus DAT-72 with separate card that takes half the time . Should be considered normal ? TIA GuidoElia HELPPC ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
