“Why do we run backups?” This question was the opening of my Backup Exec trainings for many years. And I got dozens of different answers from my audiences. The one I liked most was: “Because my boss enforces us to do so.” Sadly though it was very seldom that someone answered that a reason could […]
This tool is useful for setting the buffer values on the Backup Exec Server that are used for backing up VMware hosted virtual machines. Setting these values correctly will increase the backup performance dramatically. There are recommended values for usage with the PingUs backup appliances but you can also use the tool to set the
Tool: PingUs Performance Tuner for VMware Backups Read More »
Introduction Using Backup Exec to back up virtual environments that use Hyper-V 2 (Windows Server 2008 R2) as hypervisor may be not as simple as it first looks. In this paper I want to cover some of the reasons why partners and customers struggle getting reliable backups in those environments, especially when using clustered Hyper-V
This tool creates region specific lists of holidays that can be imported into Symantec Backup Exec. As of today, this tool works for Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Note: The private and commercial usage of this tool is explicitly allowed free of charge. Likewise the distribution of the tool, as
My answer to the question whether one should change a classic tape library into a virtual tape library is nearly the same as for the question regarding the use of VTLs instead of backup to disk or deduplication storages. Because we have the same issue here: VTLs are, oversimplified, just file servers. So they have
In this days it is hip to store all kinds of data in the cloud, thus on a storage reachable over the internet and housed in a more or less huge data center. This trend is also seen in terms of data protection. The idea behind this is to store the data that was previously
Given the question, whether backup should be done to disk or to tape, my answer is always the same: both. Each of these storage types has its benefits and its disadvantages and only when they are combined, you can tap the full potential of them. As explained in my post Hardware – Tapes the essential
Backup serves the need to prevent data loss by various reasons: environmental outages, logical failures, human errors or even sabotage. In contrast to this, archiving is the attempt to store data for long time periods, in many cases for legal purposes. In addition to this, most archiving solutions provide fast search indexes in order to
Today I want to explain the different backup methods and their (dis-)advantages a bit more in detail. But let’s start with some background information: The Archive Bit The archive bit is a file attribute used in Microsoft Windows to flag newly created and changed files. This attribute can be interpreted (and changed) by backup products.
Some hardware vendors offer so-called virtual tape libraries (VTL) in their portfolio. A VTL is a server, usually run with a proprietary operating system. Those servers offer a defined amount of internal storage that they present over the network. They do this by simulating a tape library to the backup server. Most of the machines