Creating Striped Backups

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Creating Striped Backups

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 736172
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February 18, 2015 at 8:06 pm

#314692

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Creating Striped Backups

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iposner Ten Centuries Points: 1161 More actions · Answer 1

For IO constrained environments, striped backups come into their own when the backups are compressed: Since the compression process is inevitably single-threaded, increasing the number of striped backup files permits more CPUs to be brought to bear compressing less data each. This is beneficial until such time as your IO subsystem again becomes the bottleneck or you run out of cores.

Barry Wimlett SSC Journeyman Points: 95 More actions · Answer 2

For striped sets consider using a tool like quickpar2 which allow you to add some "redundancy" files.

If the backup is 100% of the data, using quickpar2 to create some extra making the size of the files equivilent to 110% of the data.

As long as you have any 100% of the 110% of the data quickpar2 can recover the original data.

Its a useful and free tool.

Clive Strong SSChampion Points: 11222 More actions · Answer 3

I've only ever used this once. We had a client who wanted to move from our hosted platform to their own infrastructure. Rather than wait on courier to pick up and ship a drive with their backup, they requested it be done via FTP.

If I recall, it was about 50GB in total, so I made 10 x 5GB files and had them pull it all together back on their end.

I still say getting a courier would have been less pain than sitting at home from 11pm copying the files on one by one because they only had about 8GB free on the FTP site! They were a US company and they could only do this in the evening for some reason!

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736172 More actions · Answer 4

iposner (2/19/2015)
For IO constrained environments, striped backups come into their own when the backups are compressed: Since the compression process is inevitably single-threaded, increasing the number of striped backup files permits more CPUs to be brought to bear compressing less data each. This is beneficial until such time as your IO subsystem again becomes the bottleneck or you run out of cores.

Great point. I'll update the article.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736172 More actions · Answer 5

Clive Strong (2/19/2015)
I've only ever used this once. We had a client who wanted to move from our hosted platform to their own infrastructure. Rather than wait on courier to pick up and ship a drive with their backup, they requested it be done via FTP.
If I recall, it was about 50GB in total, so I made 10 x 5GB files and had them pull it all together back on their end.
I still say getting a courier would have been less pain than sitting at home from 11pm copying the files on one by one because they only had about 8GB free on the FTP site! They were a US company and they could only do this in the evening for some reason!

There are some copy/ftp programs that will interleave these copies together, and even pick up if they restart.

Perry Whittle SSC Guru Points: 234013 More actions · Answer 6

nice article Steve, but would be helpful for readers to see the T-SQL behind the backup and restore commands I think

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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736172 More actions · Answer 7

Linked at the bottom in the challenge.

I'll make it more prominent.