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December 15th, 2015 07:00
What data is exported with AER tape exports
I am looking to find a clear answer as to what data is exported when using Avamar Extended Retention. I know to a certain degree but I have never felt fully confident as to what all is exported to tape. I understand that AER rehydrates the data before sending to tape but it seems like AER uses a significant amount of tapes compared to our previous backup solution did. For instance, a 2TB backup from our file server required approx. 12 LTO3 tapes. With out previous backup solution, 15-20 tapes would be required for all of our prod and development servers, approx. 80 servers including exchange, file server, multiple sql servers, etc.I always assumed it was the metadata that was needed to go along with the backup that is being exported, but if the data is being rehydrated - I would expect the metadata would be more or less the client information.
can anyone give me a good clear answer as to what data, besides the backup data being exported, is exported to tape?
I have been reading about ADMe and how it would be better to go that route, but time is my biggest killer. But it may be something I need to push more towards since it seems ADMe is a lot more flexible and exports in a more readable format by other systems if needed to where AER is way more limited to only AER.
Anonymous User
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January 6th, 2016 08:00
Following up with the question I had. I talked with support and explained what is going on. I was looking at the tape usage from a how many jobs I have been kicking off and how many tapes I am having to swap out perspective. What is going on is since multiple streams running at the same time multiple export jobs can be using the same tape, in turn more data is getting exported quicker and the more tapes I am having to swap out. As I stated in my post, one export containing 2TB of data has been using up to around 12 tapes. What I wasn't noticing is another export job had used majority of the same tapes. Portions of an export job
Thought I would pass this information along for anyone else to read.
sconstable
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January 26th, 2016 14:00
I actually get very good compression on the AER tapes. I am using T10K tape drives with T2 tapes (native capacity 8.5T) some tapes will not stop writing till it gets over 25T on a tape. It all depends on the data being exported. (VMs and file systems compress a lot better than NDMP data)
Also, from the AER node, the command to see how much data is actually on the tape is
'mminfo -m'
that will show you how much actual data it on them, not the "% full" you see from gui.