Arcserve runs slow

There's too man uknowns here to advise you yet:

How much data on each server?

What type of files -- large, small, docs, programs?

What's the reported throughput?

Is one doing a verify an the other not?

What kind of tape drive(s)? howare they connected?

How much ram?

Protocols?

Very vague but heres a vague answer..

My novell 4.11 servers were very slow backing up granted they had a little over 120GB of compressed data on them. But mine would start at 6:00PM and finish the next morning around 11:00AM. The only way thatI could speed them up wes to disable verify and I also cleaned up the databases.

My databases were aprox 2GB. I all the databases files sys:\system\arcserve6.6\dbase?\*.* to a backup dir. I then copied all the files out of the emptyd dir directory into the now empty dbase dir. If you have to do a restore though you will need to merge any tape that is older than when you copied the database files.

HTH..

We had a problem with arcserve slowing down we changed to use the Arcserve drivers to do the backup as opposed to nwaspi (You modify the asconfig.ini and add the canwpadb driver there) If you check out Arcserve's site you can find out information onthis. Our problem was we were trying to backup over 20000 images files in one folder and it was killing throuhgput. There was a Novell bulletin that if you get over 10,000 files in 1 folder performance will suffer.

Another factor could be virus scanning. I always unload Netshld prior to starting backup or major installs. Scanning of files while backing up is a definite no-no.

Arcserve driver canwpadb is much faster the nwaspi. Cut my backup time by 4 hours! When was the last time you did a purge on the volumes being backuped? I found zip and large 20+megs files slow the backup process down a lot! Check the arcserve logs...I found that damaged\corrapted files would sometimes cause arcserve to abend or slow to a crawl.
My 5.1 boks is also the tree master...arcserve takes twice as long to backup the tree part of the job versus the backup of the 120gb data on the boks!

Both my 5.1 & 4.11 store both 120gbs of data but the 5.1 backups in +- 7 hours whre the 4.11 does the same in 2 hours???

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