[Samba] Large Backups to Windows

[Justin Pittman]

Hi,

This is a kind of scenario question for best practices -- within limits.  I've
inherited a less than ideal backup situation: backups are transferred from
Samba to Windows.  I can't get out of this situation without major
re-engineering and the only problem is the time it takes to do full backups.
Specifically:

-200GiB is taking a few days to backup
-Cpio is doing the backup across cifs

Here are optimizations I've tried so far:

+switch from smbfs to cifs -- yes this is an old-ish system but Samba 3.0.10
+mount local noatime
+installed 1G more memory -- almost 1.5G is cached
+verified low processor & vm usage -- data i/o doesn't
+appear to be spreading to other subsystems configure Windows for larger
+FS cache

These Samba and Windows hosts are on the same network (and the same, Gig
switch as far as I can tell).  What scares me is the latency of backups
(because it's really no longer a Saturday backup) and the time to
restore.  Anyone
tried cpio & smbd blocking factors? Or what other networking suggestions are
there?  The only kind of tweaking I've done is for tape backups but that was
local to a host ...

Justin


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