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Offsite Vault Backup - Backup Suggestions and Operating Experince (OE)

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Message 1 of 6
panzilte
552 Views, 5 Replies

Offsite Vault Backup - Backup Suggestions and Operating Experince (OE)

Hello,

We are currently having an issue with the offsite backup of the vault backup.  We use the built in backup utility in the Vault to perform daily backups of the vault.

Sunday - Full backup

Monday through Saturday - Incremental Backup

These are run using a script.  The vault part of the backup works well, however; what we are having an issue with is the offsite backup of the vault backup.  The offsite backup of the full backup requires approximately 40 hours.  The offsite backup is run remotely; because of the length of time it takes the offsite backup slows network performance.  Normally, the offsite backup gets paused during business hours so poor network performance will not to effect productivity.  After normal business hours, the offsite is resumed.  This can take up to 3 days to complete.  One of the reasons that this occurs is that the vault backup utility creates a new unique folder name for each backup.  For example the folder name for a recent backup was

Z:\Vault Backup\A\VaultBackup_2014_02_23_12_06_03_AM

 

The folder name for the full backup the week before was

Z:\Vault Backup\A\VaultBackup_2014_02_16_12_03_10_AM

 

The data from one week’s full backup, to the next week’s full backup does not change that much, because the folder name is different from one week to the next the offsite backup system does a complete backup of each full backup.  Our VAR had suggested that we rename the Vault Backup folder to a common folder name each week, but the VAR also said that this is impossible to automate.  What I am looking for is operating experience what do other companies do for their redundant backup of the vault backup?  Does your company use

  •          Onsite system?
  •          Second server at an offsite location
  •          Have someone found a method to automate the vault backup folder renaming?
  •          Etc..

 

Here is some information regarding our Vault 

Vault Pro 2013

Full SQL Server

Vault Size 195 Gb

Vault Growth rate 1 Gb every two weeks

 

Thanks

Tom

5 REPLIES 5
Message 2 of 6
swalton
in reply to: panzilte

Our system is slightly different:

1. Vault backup is about 230 gb

2. Full backup is done Friday night

3. Incremental backups are done Monday, Tuesday, Wenesday, and Thursday nights.

    No one is working on Saturday or Sunday, no reason to make a backup.

    If you switched your full backup to start Friday evening, you have more than 48 hours to write the backup and move it offsite.

4. We write our backups to a Hot-swappable hard drive and hand carry it offsite each week.

5. Our Vault server runs on a VMWare instance. We take snapshots of the entire server every 12 hours and use SAN software to move the snapshot off site. The SAN software uses deduplaction to reduce the amount of data that moves from our local server to the remote location.

 

Our primary backup is the VMWare snapshots of the Vault server, OS and filestore.  Our secondary backups are the ones created by Vault. 

Steve Walton
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Inventor 2023
Vault Professional 2023
Message 3 of 6
panzilte
in reply to: swalton

Thanks for the reply.

I have made the suggestion of swappable drives before.

We do work on Saturday and on rare ocassion Sunday.

Moving the full backup to Saturday maybe a better solution.

 

I would still like to know more.

What do other companies do?

Thanks

 

Message 4 of 6
ihayesjr
in reply to: panzilte

Is your offsite location a backup service or just a file storage service?




Irvin Hayes Jr
Sr. Product Manager
Autodesk, Inc.

Vault - Under the Hood Blog
Message 5 of 6
swalton
in reply to: ihayesjr

In our case, the offsite storage is a NAS/SAN box at a trusted employee's house. The company pays for the box and the network connectivity for the employee. 

 

If that was not available, I imagine we would find a co-location provider that would let us install a server in their rack. 

 

Our basic setup has all servers (Vault, Exchange, others) as separate virtual machines.  We have a rack in the office with two physical hosts connected to a SAN.  One host is the production unit, the other is the hot spare.  If a host fails, we move the images to the hot spare.  If the SAN goes down, someone gets the remote unit from the employee's house. 

Steve Walton
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Inventor 2023
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Message 6 of 6
steveh3
in reply to: swalton

We have been thru the gamut on backups....

We have flip-flopped from the Vault backup, IT doing the complete backup, to the third party backup, back to Vault backup again.

 

From my experience (over ten years dealling with Vault) is that the Vault Backup is the best solution and most fool proof solution available. It has allowed me to take ownership of the back up and know that it is working as it should and allows me to periodically restore to a test server (if you are lucky enough) to verify your backup.

 

I have found that if we relied on IT to do our backups and they were inconsistant, unreliable and did not have the abilty to easily restore to confirm that we have a good backup.

 

I just like knowing that if a server goes down, I have a good backup that we can restore in a day and get everyone backup and running. If I give the responsibility to someone else (IT).... I'm hoping we have a good backup rather than knowing.

 

So....here's what we are doing...

 

I'm dealing with a 65 Gb database and a 1.2 Tb filestore (Yes, with a T). It takes us approximately 30 hours to do a full back.

 

I'm using the standard Vault Backup Utility to do a full backup on Friday night and then incrementals Monday thru Thursday.

 

I have two removable storage devices (Synology DiskStations [DS713]) which connect thru a 1 Gb switch and the devices are in a room separate from our servers.

 

Each device allows me to hold two full backups plus the incrementals. On Friday mornings I swap out the devices and take one home with me to have a backup off site.

 

So, at any given time I have two good backups off site and at least one backup on-site. (One device has Backups #1 and #3 / the other device has backups #2 and #4).

 

Ideally I would like to backup to the cloud to eliminate the devices, but with amount of data we are dealing with, just does not allow for it.

 

I use a .bat file to delete the folder structures on the devices and then also kick off the backup in the same script. Windows task scheduler initiates the scripts.

 

HTH,

 

Steve H.

Inventor---Vault Professional

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