"Mike" wrote:
>
>Are there any good methods for siginificantly improving backup performance
>on a Windows file system (a fileshare server) with lots of files? For example,
>a fileserver with tens or hundreds of thousands of files, 500+GB. Backup
>performance is slow due to the number of files, all the tape markers, etc,
>I think.
>
>To be clear, try this test: back up a large-ish directory and get 2MB/sec.
> Now create an NTBackup bkf file of that same directory and back that up
>and get 10 MB/sec or more.
>
>This is also seen with NTBackup (which I believe is really a Veritas product
>in the guts of things). And its not, from anything I can tell, a performance
>problem for the server itself (network, disk, etc). It seems to be all
the
>small files.
>
>You can do "bpbkar32 -nocont d:\mydir > NUL" and "bpbkar32 -nocont d:\bigflie
>> NUL" and get two really different performances. Eliminates network, tape
>contention, etc.

Take a look at FlashBackup: it's supposed to get around this problem by
doing a lower-level style backup rather than worrying explicitly about files.


Scott