NovaBACKUP 10 xSP

Technical TrainingBy: Nathan Fouarge

Nathan.Fouarge@novastor.com

NovaBACKUP Components of the Setup

NovaBACKUP Storage Server (NovaNet-Web Backup Server) Today’s TrainingRemote Manager (Technical Training II)Commerce Server (Technical Training II)Application Update Service (Technical Training II)Web Based Restore (WBR) (Technical Training II)

20.08.2009 NBK xSP Tech2

NovaBACKUP Network Diagram

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NovaBACKUP Storage Server config

OS drive in RAID 1Separate drive for Work folder

Fastest drive needed in the systemRollups and Restore speed is highly dependent on this drive.The drive contents are invalidated when the backup service is restarted.

Storage DriveRAID 1+0 (RAID 10) preferredRAID 6 preferred over RAID 5Speed of this drive is a determining factor on speed of backups and restores.

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SQL Server config

Preferrably Microsoft SQL 2005 or 2008 full version.OS Drive in RAID 1Log Drive in RAID 1+0 (RAID 10)Database Drive in RAID 1+0 (RAID 10)Speed of your database server and the connectivity from the backup server to the SQL server is a determining factor of speed of backups and restores.

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Web Server config

IIS 6 and IIS7 are the only current supported web servers.OS drive in RAID 1Data drive in RAID 6 or 5 is fine.The commerce server, remote manager, web based restore, and application update service are located on this machine.Not very load intensive, but uptime is important.

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Maintaining NovaBACKUP Storage Server

Antivirus software on this machine is not recommended, only port open to the world is port 308. Port 2003 needs to be open to the web server, and SQL connection to the SQL server.Make sure windows search indexing is turned off.Defragmentation and deleting files in the work drive/directory when the backup server service is shutdown is highly recommended.Monitoring disk space, disk I/O, and network capacity is highly recommended.

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Maintaining NovaBACKUP Storage Server

Monitoring the Masterlog for the backup server and the Windows event log for errors is also recommended.Proper shutdown of the backup server service includes blocking port 308, and using windows service manager to shutdown the service. Killing the backup server service via task manager or just rebooting the machine is not the proper way to do it.

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Backing up the Storage Server.

There are only 2 supported ways to do a backup of the user data.

Shut down the backup server service so nothing is touching the user’s data. Then use normal backup methods to backup the data.Block or I/O level based replication. A recommendation for software for this is SteelEye.

Backing up the OS and other things normally is fine.

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Explaining the Storage Server Storage

The user data for the Storage Server is stored in a proprietary structured storage file, which acts like a mini filesystem.The Storage Server does not lock these files when writing to them, so programs, such as backup programs, that want an exclusive lock can cause issues including corruption to the user storage.Each file on the Storage Server represents a single file on the user’s backup. So multiple versions of one file are all contained in one Storage Server container.

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How rollups work

By default the Storage Server is set to wait until 7 outdated versions of a file are in the storage container before removing the outdated versions from the container. This is changeable in the backupserver.ini.

Reducing this number will reduce the excess storage on the backup server, but it will also put a higher load on the backup server.

A minimum number of restorable versions to keep in the container is configurable in the backupserver.ini. The default is 1.

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How rollups work.

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The Storage Server Database

All the file histories and file names that are backed up are now stored in the SQL database. This does a number of things. Since the server is no longer relying on the APF file and the storage indexes of each piece of storage to tell the client the histories and files that are on the server Backups, Restores, and Deletes are much faster and take less resources on the Storage Server than previous versions. 

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Client to Server backup process.

When a backup is started by the client to the Storage Server a number of things happen

The client authenticates against the Storage Server.After that authentication the client requests the ‘APF’ file which contains the computer names and volumes that have backed up to that account along with what files have been backed up and the associated backup information for the files/folders.Assuming the client is in ‘Full’ backup mode the client then parses this APF file to an XML file for file lookups.Assuming the client is in ‘Full’ backup mode each file that is selected for backup is checked against this XML file as to whether it has changed or not. The checks are done against the modified date, creation date, and size of the file. The archive bit is not used.

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Client to Server backup process.

Now if the client software is not set to ‘Full’ backup mode, and instead differential or incremental the client will ONLY send files that the archive bit is set on. It will not use this XML file to check to see if the file has changed or not. Though FastBIT will still work and still find files that have not changed.Reasons why you would choose Incremental or Differential against the ‘Full’ backup mode would be speed. Currently the checking of these files against the XML on large file sets can cause the backup time to be longer than it would be with an incremental or differential backup.

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FastBIT and how it works.

FastBIT is the xSP devices way of doing binary differential backups of files that have changed.The default behavior of the NovaBACKUP xSP software is that the first backup of a file that is performed the cache of the file that FastBIT needs to work is not cached. By default files are cached after they have been sent in full twice to the backup server. This however does not apply to plug-ins such as Exchange, SQL, and System State as they are cached on the initial backup. This behavior for the normal files can be changed in the backupclient.ini file.

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FastBIT and how it works.

As of the 10.3.15 client software the default size for FastBIT to work on a file is set to 100GB.There are currently two folders that can contain large amounts of temporary or cache files. You can define the xSP cache folder in the properties of the xSP device. This folder only affects the cache folder and the temp folder for the xSP device. On the Home tab in the NovaBACKUP software under default settings in the Advanced tab there is also a setting the entire program, such as where the plugins are staged before backup.

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FastBIT and how it works.

When a file change is being reduced by FastBIT here is the process it goes through.

File is copied to the xSP temp folder.Cache file is copied to the xSP temp folder.FastBIT comparison is done between the cached file and the newly changed file. This produces a patch file.This file is then sent over protocol to the Storage Server and a checksum is calculated and checked before sending and after receipt of the patch.The server then adds this FastBIT patch to the storage for this particular file. At this point a check is done to make sure this patch can be applied to the previous version of storage for this file as a final consistency check.

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Remote Settings

Remote Settings can be sent from the server to the NovaBACKUP xSP client when the xSP device connects to the server.There are many things that can be sent to the client via remote settings some of which are:

Backup Script file selectionsSchedulesVarious different settings for the xSP device, such as to send the deleted file list to server.

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Send Deleted File List to Server Option

This option is in the xSP device configuration in NovaBACKUP.Enabling this option will make it so that NovaBACKUP xSP will check against the XML file list that is received from the Storage Server and any file that is in this XML list but NOT available on the machine that is backing up, say if it was deleted or moved, NovaBACKUP will tell the server to mark it as deleted.A file marked for deletion will be deleted from the backup server after the restore window is completed for the file in question.

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Q&A