Thoughts on Backup - splitting size versus single large file?
I always do just full image backups and leave the archive size automatic for splitting. I never thought much about it until now. My backup archives vary from 60 GB to about 600 GB. I backup 5 partitions. Periodically I generate a new one and delete an older version.
I just got a 4TB drive for these backups and after cloning the older drive I decided to give the new drive a stress test/burn-in by de-fragmenting the new drive.
This took about a day, not because of the number of fragments, but because of the size of the files. Even if a 600GB file is in 3 or 4 fragments - the file had to be moved out of a region and then copied back to a better spot.
So that led me to think about the advantages of using smaller split sizes on these archives.
I also use Retrospect for all my routine nightly incremental backups. Retrospect archives have a fixed split size of about 640MB.
As a test, I made a system backup in ATI using 512MB split size. I didn't notice any difference in backup or validation times.
This is probably not a big deal no matter what you do, but I was wondering what other folk's thought may be on this topic?
Any pros and cons over small splits versus large single-file archive sizes?
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