Backup Entire Share Drives?

I Have a Question
1

We are currently running the evaluation copy. We are able to backup individual directories on our small shares, but notice that only one backup can run at a time.

We need to be able to backup a couple large shares in their entirety. Dozens of directories with 3-4 TB data total. Please advise on if/how this can be done efficiently.

2

Hi @IT1,
Can you provide some additional details on what you are trying to optimize?

The odrive backup feature should let you backup whatever directories you want. Are you saying that you would like to take the drive letter as the source instead of a directory within the drive letter. So, for example X:\ instead of X:\FolderA?

Are you needing backup concurrency just for the initial backup, or for future backups, as well?

Once the initial backups are done, future backups will be incremental. The initial backup of several terabytes will take quite a while, of course, but after that things should speed up significantly.

Since you are working with shares, you could run odrive on multiple systems/instances, each targeting a different share, to achieve backup concurrency.

3

The preferred option would be to backup X:\ instead of X:\FolderA. We are trying to back up all of our working and archive files. Even just going after the root directories, there would be dozens of backups generated otherwise. Backing up concurrently would be ideal. Other than our server - the one being used to back up the shares, all of our other computers are dedicated to individual user and can’t be set up to run additional instances of Odrive.

It is generally true that once the initial backup is complete that the incremental backups would be much smaller. However they would still be spread across numerous directories.

Additionally some of the users have been pretty active moving individual files and directories around. How does Odrive handle this situation - are obsolete files/directories purged?

4

Hi @IT1,

I haven’t had a chance to test this, but it may work for your needs:

You could try creating a symbolic link to the shared drive to simulate the required folder structure. For example:
mklink /d C:\The_X_Drive X:\

You then should be able to right-click on the C:\The_X_Drive folder and select “backup to odrive”. This wouldn’t be an “officially supported” method, but I think it will provide the desired functionality.

In a sync scenario would delete move/delete the items, but in a backup scenario nothing is deleted/purged. The files/folders would remain where they are on the remote storage and they would also be uploaded in the new remote location.

To clarify the scenario and environment:

  • You have multiple network shares that are mapped to your users’ systems
  • Your users utilize these network shares for their day-to-day work, which means files and folders are added, updated, deleted, moved, renamed, etc.
  • You want to backup these network shares to cloud storage

Is that correct?

5

To clarify the scenario and environment:

  • You have multiple network shares that are mapped to your users’ systems
  • Your users utilize these network shares for their day-to-day work, which means files and folders are added, updated, deleted, moved, renamed, etc.
  • You want to backup these network shares to cloud storage

Is that correct?
Yes, That is correct.