Putting Backup in the Fast Lane
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Like many small businesses, Mary and I keep our email and files on a small server running Small Business Server 2003. It’s a useful little OS, and its built-in backup tools simplify archiving your data and your email. We’re also backing up volume shadow copy data, so lost files can be retrieved from Windows’ often ignored file system snapshots.
(If you’ve not turned it on Shadow Copies yet, go do it now. Yes, you’ll lose some free disk space, but you’ll gain a lot of peace of mind. Right click on a volume, and open the properties dialog. In the Shadow Copies tab, click “Enable”. Shadow Copies may not be as pretty as Apple’s Time Machine, but it does the same job, and it’s here now. If you’re trying out a business edition of Vista, you can turn it on there too…)
We currently do nightly backups onto a NAS appliance, a Buffalo Terastation Pro, shifting around 50 GB from the server to the NAS store. With 2 TB of disk space, configured as RAID 5, there’s plenty of space for several days worth of backups. There was only one fly in the ointment: the backup was taking far too long.
That fly was down to our network. 100 base-T Ethernet is fine for most purposes, but 50 GB of backup took just under nine hours every night. That’s a significant amount of time, and the more data being backed up, the longer it would take - and the process was already beginning to eat into the working day.
I’m in the process of upgrading our network from 100 base-T to 1000 base-T. With gigabit Ethernet prices plummeting, it’s becoming easy to justify the upgrade. The Buffalo Terastation Pro has on board gigabit, and more and more motherboards come with built in gigabit networking. We’ve started the upgrade by removing our venerable Allied Telesyn FS716 switch, and replacing it with a D-Link DGS 1024D 24-port gigabit unmanaged switch. We’d already moved much of the cabling to CAT 5e and CAT 6, so it was ready for gigabit speeds.
The first machine to get an upgrade was the server. Its motherboard Ethernet needed to be disabled in the BIOS, and I dropped a D-Link DGE-530T PCI gigabit network card into a spare PCI slot. Reassigning IP addresses didn’t take long, and the server was soon reporting a 1GBps connection to the network.
Last night the backup ran as usual, but this time it took a lot less time - more than three hours less. The previous night’s run took 8 hours 52 minutes, post upgrade dropping to 5 hours 44 minutes. Perhaps not as much of a change as I’d have liked, but the actual process of building the backup set and verifying the data still takes a while. Certainly it’s still a substantial improvement.
It’ll be interesting to see the effects of the next stage of the network upgrade - a new server built using an Intel Core Duo Core VPro motherboard and running a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. We’ll report back on that upgrade early in the New Year.– Simon Bisson
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