What do you use for backups of very large vaults?

[ryan]

I just wanted to check with the user community to see what you are using to backup very large vault environments?  For purposes of discussion, let's use a 1TB vault as a starting point (of which I have customers that exceed this multiple times over). 

As a customers vault environment grows in size, ADMS backup and restore is not the most efficient means of protecting your data as the time to backup or restore can be excessive, 24-48 hours is not unreasonable for some of these customer vaults.    Even with incremental backup and restore you still have the full backup as part of the archive set so you can't really get away from some of these long delays.  And, since we are on the topic of incremental backup and restore, let's not forget that an incremental backup makes a full copy of the database every time which cuts down on the number of incremental backup you might be able to create before having to start a new archive set.

Almost all of my enterprise vault customers are using Virtual Servers and Veeam seems to be the tool of choice for backing up these large vaults.

What are you using?

Thanks, 

Ryan

[ryan]

I just wanted to clarify my comment about incremental backup in the initial post;  An incremental backup is only incremental with respect to the filestore, the database is a full copy each time.  So, if you have a vault with a 100GB database and do 5 incremental backups, you have 500GB of database backup.  Because of this, you will more quickly run out of available space for backups and must then clear the current archive set to run a new one (full + incremental).   It would be great if incremental backup was incremental for both the database and filestore, then you could run many more incremental backups before having to start a new backup set. 

[rtowne72]

I will be interested in the responses as our Vault is approaching 1Tb for the Filestore and we are looking for a more efficient method.  The backups are getting to take so long (via the ADMS method) and then space is becoming a consideration.  I push the backup to Azure as an archive by date to save space locally.  If anyone is using Veeam  or similar product, I would be interested to hear what the routine is programmed.

[paul.gunn]

There is a white paper on using Vault with third party backup / restore solutions.

I believe this sort of process is used by some bigger Vault deployments:

http://download.autodesk.com/us/vault/Backup_and_Restore_Autodesk_Vault.pdf

Paul

[ryan]

Hi Paul,

Yes I am well aware of that document but want to get into the specifics of what tools others might be using.
Many of my larger customers are using Veeam, curious what others are using.

[rtowne72]

Our IT group is looking to use Azure as a backup for the Vault.  Has anyone used Azure backup for their Vault?

Thanks,

Rob Towne