Slow replication of backups
Hi,
I'm trying to get a handle on performance issues with Acronis Backup. We backup from Hyper-V, Xen server, and a Windows file server to disk on two storage nodes. Then, the backups are to be replicated to tape for offsite on a weekly basis. Backups can take a long time, even incremental backups. However, the replication jobs can take even longer. This is awkward as the agents will allow sending only one backup or replication stream at a time.
As and example, I tried to move a storage location's contenets to the other storage node. That was 38 hours ago and it has shown 38% completed for the past 17 hours or more. While this is running I can't run any other replications off that storage node. I used a replication instead of another backup so it wouldn't hold up other file backups from the source file server.
Can someone explain the what is happening at each stage in the replication process and how to improve it? Is it decompressing the data and re-compressing it to send to the other node? maybe network stack used in between processes too?
I have other questions about replication too but will ask them next.
Thanks,
Albert
In reply to Hi Albert,… by truwrikodrorow…
Thanks Vasily,
DeDupe not used on either of the two storage locations. I had tried with dedupe because of the size of these backups but found the replication slow so I deleted the storage and started again without it, only to find the replication still slow. Even though there is only about another 20 hours to go, I think I'll delete it all and try again from scratch without compression; the full backup will take less time that the remaining replication, sigh! Then I'll know if the compression is causing the problem. I was watching resource monitor and could see disk reads at up to 1 - 11MB/s turn into network writes of 50MB/s to another process on the same storage node. These were read by another process that turned it into 9 MB/s network writes to the other storage node. My only explanation is compression.
I've got other replication issues that are just as important e..g
1) tried backup to tape - that was as fast as to disk - but can't replicate from it to another tape or any other location - perhaps that's the bug you refer to
2) want to get a weekly, automated, full backup offsite for backups that are "always incremental", without losing 2 weeks of incremental recovery points
Acronis Storage seems a bit of overkill if I just want some local disk for backup storage.
Thanks again,
Albert
Hi Albert,
If you don't use deduplication then there is not too much sense in using Acronis Storage Node (ASN) locations (except for tape-based ones) versus backup locations on a plain network share, unless you have some strict security requirements which do not allow SMB protocol to be used.
Also backup replication _from_ tape-based locations is not supported (see https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_12.5/index.html#38952.html) - these types of locations are supposed to be the final destination.
Basing on the above I'd recommended you to store backups on plain network shares first and then replicate backups between these locations (if required) and over to tape-based location (which should be on ASN).
Thank you.