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Best Practices
After deciding on a backup solution, establish procedures that will enhance the reliability and
effectiveness of the backups. The following sections describe general recommendations for
performing a backup. Keep company specific needs and environment in mind when
implementing these suggestions.
Regular and Reliable Backups
The NAS 1000s uses RAID 5 for data protection and high availability. The RAID 5
configuration is not user configurable. This configuration makes data loss due to disk failure
unlikely, because two drives in the same array must fail at the same time for data loss to occur.
Although unlikely, such a failure can occur. Despite this feature, the only way to reliably
safeguard data against accidental loss, intentional tampering, or hardware failures is with
regularly scheduled backup and offsite storage of backup media. Backups prevent an
inconvenience from becoming a tragedy.
Automated Tape Libraries
Automated tape libraries improve performance, capacity, and reliability of tape backup
operations and should be used whenever possible. Libraries must be enabled by additional
licensing, installation of library control modules, and configuration steps. Benefits of tape
libraries include:
Multiple Backup Devices
To take advantage of multiple backup devices, the server must be configured correctly.
Generally, backing up multiple disks requires multiple tape drives. If the NAS device has 500
GB of disk space and this space is arranged as a single volume, it is not possible to directly
take advantage of multiple tape drives. If possible, make multiple, smaller volumes. This
procedure lets the administrator back up the multiple devices in parallel, sending the data from
one or two disks to each tape in parallel. This type of configuration greatly reduces the time
required for backup and makes the most efficient use of the tape backup device.
If it is necessary to use a single volume, the administrator configures several backup groups to
contain the various directory trees at the root, so that more than one tape device can work in
parallel.
Also, note how the volumes are constructed when setting up backup jobs. To increase the
performance of the backups, schedule the back up of volumes so that disks that share a
common set of physical drives are scheduled at different times. The underlying physical disks
can devote more time to each of the backup jobs, rather than having two backup jobs
competing for disk I/O.
NAS 1000s Administration Guide
Enhanced performance by the automated, instantaneous handling of tapes, requiring no
lag time for an administrator to arrive and manually change the tape.
Improved capacity because tape libraries include storage slots for additional tape
cartridges. Enough media can be loaded so that operations can continue overnight, over
the weekend, or all week, without intervention or tape changes.
Increased reliability because tapes are handled less and the human element of
forgetfulness in changing tapes is eliminated.
Backup Management
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