Transferring a 400 GB Full Backup on a WAN...

  • Hi,

    I was wondering if there's a program you guys would recommend in transferring a 400 GB full backup over a WAN. Or how would you transfer the full backup? The only solution I could come up with is splitting the full backup into many smaller files...

    We also have Riverbed (http://www.riverbed.com/products/wan-optimization/) appliances between the two sites, but I have enabled SQL compression for the full backup so I wouldn't think it helps much. Perhaps I should attempt to disable SQL compression and compare times during a test transfer...

    Any suggestions?

  • FTP

  • Thank you for your response.

    Can you please explain to me how that will result in a faster transfer?

  • Faster than what? FTP (and its secure cousin, SFTP) has been used for this sort of thing since 1971. Its the usual first choice.

  • Oh oops, I forgot to mention that I have been transferring files using RoboCopy.

  • If you have the file compressed, additional compression is usually not possible. You can either just move the file as is, or try splitting it up and moving the smaller files. But, that carries risk and it may not make it any faster.

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  • There are several products available that can help with this kind of data transfer. I used RocketStream before TIBCO bought them and it worked very well.

    You have to be very careful with these types of tools though, as they can (and will) take up all available bandwidth. You may be able to get similar results using Robocopy and multi-threading the copy but probably not the same optimization.

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  • I split file with 7 zip to smaller peaces and move them with multiple xcopy commands over rdp session.

    This way I am able to continue if connection drops.

  • Thank you for your responses.

    Does anyone know of any product that can throttle a file transfer down? I'm looking at a 45 MB bandwidth, but looking to only utilize 20 MB for the full backup file... I've been toying with Robocopy and it's kinda quirky to use (the /ipg switch) and the results I'm getting are either very low (like 5 MB) or utilizes the entire bandwidth.

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