Thanks to all for the feedback, included are all the responces I've
received. Basically they all pretty much say the same thing:
-Letato takes up 200 bytes/file, so the more files you backup the larger the
db will be, not how much space your backing up.
-Only backup things that change and do incremental backups, make seperate
groups for system files or don't even back that up.
-Buy more disk for the db's depending on how long your retention policies
are, the online database is probably one of the major reasons Admin's even
use Networker.
Thanks to:
hkatz@panix.com
simon@horizon.cc.huji.ac.il
Bruce.Cross@tti.fingerhut.com
jimm@csdc02.orl.mmc.com
ebubjm@ebu.ericsson.se
campbell@aps1.orl.mmc.com
kevin@ma.pdc.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Henry Katz <hkatz@panix.com>
size of your server means nothing, nsr takes about 200 bytes / file.
Get a calculator and multiply. Judiciously choose your client file
systems and liberally sprinkly .nsr files throughout that do
skips on file systems that are static (after of course you've backed
them up once).
Don't be so conservative in your on-line recover date policy and your
tapevolume date policy. Also use lots of nsrck -F host to trim down
overgrown dbs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: William Charles <william.charles@sbil.co.uk>
Shorten your `browse' & `retention' poilicies for each client. Also, make
sure that you're not doing a full backup every night -- every file saved to
tape will require an entry in the database, irrespective of whether it has
changed or not...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Simon Shickman <simon@horizon.cc.huji.ac.il>
Legato say that each file takes 200 byte of db space.
If you have a news server, it takes a LOT of space. X11/Openwin takes a
lot of db space.
It also depends, how often you do a full backup, you can probably do
the OS part just once a month or not at all since it is all on CD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Bruce Cross <Bruce.Cross@tti.fingerhut.com>
the following is the size of our Networker database files since the
first of the year. We do incremental backups Mon-Thur, and full backups
on Friday. Hope this helps....
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 66158592 Aug 30 03:07 db
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 67633152 Aug 30 03:04 db
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Miller <jimm@csdc02.orl.mmc.com>
The size of the Legato indexes is determined by the number of files being
backed
up, not the size of the files. Therefore, if you have alot of files, you
are
going to have a large indexe file(s).
Knowing this, you have to make a trade-off of available disk space versus
how
long you want to make the indexes available for file browsing (and what
is even
backed up).
If you are just starting to backup your site (you just installed
Networker) and
you are already out of disk space for the indexes, I would recommend
getting more disk space.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Miller 66509 <ebubjm@ebu.ericsson.se>
We ran into similar problems awhile back (SS1000 with 40 Gig).
I will make some assumptions that you have one Legato server with
19 clients. Each clients minimum index space is 2mb regardless if you
backup anything from it or not.
One item which we implemented is that we have / /usr /var in one
backup in a saveset by itself for each client which we have. In our
case we have six clients. Basically anything which is system related
only in a backup set/pool by itself. This gets backedup twice a month
full and skipped the rest of the month. (Smaller Index)
Another item which you can probably remove is /var/tmp from the backups.
And last but not least you will probably need to redefine how you are
backing up the data. Less Full backups and more incrementals. You may have
to skip a day in the week and weekends to reduce the amount of data that
Legato is trying to save in the index. Also make sure compression is on.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Phillip C. Campbell" <campbell@aps1.orl.mmc.com>
We have:
2 rs6000 servers backing up 175 and 150 unix workstations respecively....
1 HP T500 server backing up 16 HP servers....
our rs6000 servers use about 9-12 gb's of index space
our T500 server use about 4-6 gb's of index space....and growing!
Index requirements are a function of:
Size of the data being backed up...
-> Media Retention Policy....ours is currently set to 1 year...
-> Media Browse Policy.....Browse Policy is the biggy....ours set to 6 mo.
The only way you can reduce size is shorted retention and browse
policies...
which may not be a good option...after all the browse and recover
capability
is why you bought Legato in the first place....
You can/should CLEAN indexes often to reduce size...but this doesn't
help much....(see: 'nsrim')
And performance suffers when your index free-space goes down....
So bite the bullet....buy lots of big-fast disk for your online indexes!
.....the 4gb fast&wide are nice...and there are some 9gb single-ended
out there that are fast enough too!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Kevin West <kevin@ma.pdc.com>
It may be to late but BudTool is a non-proprietary backup utlity which
requires no client-side software and uses standard UNIX commands to
restore data.
If you would like any additional information please call at 1-800-654-4PDC
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
===========================================================================
Mark Sturtevant <sturt@winternet.com> | Phone: (612) 531-6765
Unix System Administrator | Fax : (612) 536-2779
P A R A N E T |
===========================================================================
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