GFS Guide

[trbyrne]

I just installed Arcserve r12 and put a Buffalo Terastation 2TB appliance on my network. I need help in properly configuring my backup on this system.

The size of a full backup of my data is roughly 35GB. I would like to implement a 7-day incremental GFS rotation (full on sundays) that takes advantage of the deduplication features of Arcserve to conserve disk space.

So far I have created 25 FSDs and placed them in the DATAGFS group in Arcserve. I know how to create the backup job, select the source, and choose my DATAGFS group as its destination. Is there anything special I should also do to ensure data deduplication, or is this automatic?

Thank you in advance for any help provided!

 

[davidmichel]

DeDupe is a feature of 12.5 which finished beta a little while ago, and so should be released soon.

I was working with the beta and DeDupe was very nice.

It does work with GFS but it is best to rethink things when using DeDupe. Consider this, an Incremental is done because the user wants to save space and only backup what has changed. So he is willing to go through the trouble of pulling a bunch of tapes in case of restore to get everything back. Now with DeDupe only the data that has changed will get backed up anyways and that is at the block level not the file level. So why not just do fulls and make restore easier if needed.

I used it for disk staging so I had only one DeDupe device and then data was migrated to tape. I think even if you are only backing up to disk it is still better to have just the one DeDupe device since you will have a much greater advantage in disk space saved rather than having 25.