On 15 jan 2009, at 15:26, John C Dury wrote:
I have two separate Windows 2003 boxes both running running v5.5.1.10 client that are both failing their incrementals every night. Both of these boxes have hundreds of thousand of files all spread into multiple directories. In fact, each day, a new directory is created and then multiple subdirectories are created under it and thousand of files in each of those subdirectories. The reason I say this is because I don't think it is a candidate for multiple virtual nodes because of the new directories that are created every day.
I do have journaling turned on although it doesn't seem to help with the large number of files either as when I run an incremental manually,it takes forever and never seems to finish.
are you sure that the journal is running and has enough space? In these cases, having the journals on a separate filesystem might be a very good idea. I have the feeling that there is not enough space for the TSM journal database...
I thought about doing image backups of the drive where the thousands of files live but when I tried it, it backed up about 14g and then just hung and never continued. I had to cancel it after waiting for an hour or so.
and to what type of storage do these images go? I'd think that in case of an image backup you'd want a management class that makes them go directly to tape. My guess is that these were going to disk volumes?
What is my best strategy for dealing with these two boxes that are generating thousands of new files in new directories every day? The huge number of objects in the TSM DB are starting to cause quite a few problems with daily processing also as expiration is running longer and longer since I think it is choking on the number of objects.
I'd say that image backups are a good idea in cases of very active filesystems. Filesystems on windows with huge numbers of files are always a cause of problems, not only with TSM.
And to make it even weirder, they both fail incrementals at night and the only error I can find is: ANR0481W Session 16603 for node <SERVERNAME> (WinNT) terminated - client did not respond within 9000 seconds. (SESSION: 16603)
meaning that indeed the client is indeed choking on the size of the directories.
I'm starting to think that TSM is just not the backup solution for either of these boxes.
I'm also thinking that if you have a piece of software creating 1000's of files per day in a filesystem, that this is a very big workload. I'm very sure that with VSS snapshots and image backups, you are on the right track and no other product could do a better job of backing up these filesystems. -- Remco Post r.p...@plcs.nl +31 6 24821 622
