Incredibly slow backup job 3

[packdragon]

After finally solving the problem of Backup Exec not being able to attach to 2 of our servers, the job is finally running all the way through! BUT it seems to be going incredibly slowly! It's been a couple days now and only 3.2 GB have been backed up. I checked the log of the ongoing backup and the only unusual thing I can see is "Drive is not responding. Backup set aborted." However after that the backups seem to be continuing normally. I checked the services and all of them are running. Is there something else I need to check? Does the drive need power-cycling? What would cause backups to proceed at such a snail's pace?

 

[Qdog]

It would be nice to have some more details. Is the Remote Agent installed on the remote servers? Does the 'Backup Exec Remote Agent for NT/2000' service show up as 'Started' in Windows services? If the remote agent is installed and the service is started, does the job log state 'Performing remote agent backup' in the beginning of the backup log. What are you backing up...Oracle, Exchange, SQL, Lotus Notes...?

To be honest, most of the time, the error message you are getting is resolved once networking or other environmental problems are fixed. It may be the server on the other end or something running on it. If there are problems with the databases of SQL, Exchange, or Oracle; you can get that error.
Check network cabling and replace cabling. Make sure NIC negotiation is Full Duplex and set it to the speed of the slowest NIC card either the Backup Exec server or remote server. Do this on the switch ports as well. Check the switch for errors. You may have a lot of collisions on the network. Try transferring a block of 400Mb of data from the remote server to the Backup Exec server and time it. If that is slow too, it is your network. Update NIC drivers on media server and remote server. Update firmware on the SCSI RAID controller for the remote servers harddrives/array. Change switch ports on the switch. If you are using Backup Exec version 8.6 or higher, try a backup-to-disk folder backup and see if that is faster. If it is a lot faster, than I would say your tape device is the source of your problem. If the backup-to-disk folder backup is just as slow, concentrate trouble-shooting on network and server problems on the remote.

Helpful technotes:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/236368.htm

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/237406.htm

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/245179.htm

 

[ahaas]

We had the same problem with BE8.6 on a W2K server. After updating all firmware and drivers, the problem still remained.
Then we freed up some capacity on the system drive C: of our backup server an DEFRAGMENTED this drive. From that the backup was fast.
I recommend to schedule defragmentation, for this purpose we use a vbs script.

 

[SQLBill]

How full is your C drive? As ahaas commented, you need to have space on that drive even if you are not backing up to there. It uses the temp directory as backups are done.

-SQLBill

 

[superjet]

I also had the same kind of problem. I finally found a duplex mismatch between the back up server and the switch port it was plugged into.
I changed the server NIC to half duplex and the problem was solved.

 

[packdragon]

As a matter of fact I do recall one of the logs mentioning Remote Agent and it having to do a standard backup. I will look more closely into that. Also I will check the C: drive's capacity as our servers have a penchant for filling it up with logs. Thanks for all the advice guys!

 

[ITsmyfault]

While you're at it, you might check your IRQ's - they can cripple a backup job. Make sure your drive controllers have a higher priority IRQ than your NIC's.

 

[gforce2002]

We had a similar problem when we upgraded to ver. 8.6. We finally tried increasing the buffer size under the backup device properties (under the configuration tab). When we upgraded, we were suddenly down to a backup rate of about 23MB/min, but after changing the buffer size to 1024 (settings depend on amount of memory, etc.) the rate went up to about 228MB/min!! Anyway, it's worth a try.