We have a QNAP NAS and the network shares are being backed up by Backup Exec 2010 over SMB. We can't install the remote agent on the NAS as it has an ARM processor and, as far as I am aware, there is no compatible agent.
Do you have any suggestions on any faster method of backing up these shares as opposed to the current scenario?
Currently the network bandwidth is not the issue, it seems that this access method is just not able to go any quicker. We've also added the NAS shares to the start of the selection list, but we're still running into 18 hours total backup time (total amount of data on the NAS is roughly 650GB).
Any comments and/or suggestions welcome.
EDIT: Data is being pulled from the NAS by Backup Exec to a LTO4 tape drive
Best Answer
You'll get much better throughput if you perform a backup to disk first and then to tape, which is the method recommended by Symantec. Performing a B2D backup is much faster than performing a backup to tape.
I perform a nightly after hours B2D backup of our production systems to a disk array on our BackupExec server and then backup those B2D backups to tape during the day. This ensures that our production servers are backed up outside of production hours (the B2D backups afford us a much smaller production backup window) while our tape backups can then run anytime. Another advantage is with restoring data, which is much faster from the B2D backups then from tape.