OT: XP SP2 Security Hole / Backup Thread Appended

[Brian K. White]

D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>> Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
>>> Transpower at aol.com propounded (on Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 11:41:11AM
>>> -0400):
>>>> In a message dated 10/2/2004 9:08:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>>> fp at wjv.com writes:
>>>>
>>>>> Transpower at aol.com, the prominent pundit, on Sat, Oct 02 11:19
>>>>> while half mumbling half-witicized:
>>>>>
>>>>>> One positive thing about XP SP2:? I installed it several days
>>>>>> ago and I must say that my computer (specifically disk reads and
>>>>>> writes) appears to be much faster than with SP1.
>>>>>
>>>>> Appearances can be deceiving.  In other words, do you have any
>>>>> benchmarks you ran before and after.  I do that on disk systems
>>>>> and save the results in the Unix servers.
>>>>
>>>> No benchmarks yet; my demo copy of Performance Test ran out.  Next
>>>> time I do a backup I'll let you know if there's any difference.  By
>>>> the way, backing up 13 GB used to take 1 hour, 20 minutes on an HP
>>>> Ultrium LTO; after changing settings so that system cache (rather
>>>> than programs) is optimized (and setting System Mechanic so that XP
>>>> writes the cache every 2 seconds), I got the backup time down to 20
>>>> minutes! And shadow copy now works properly.
>>>
>>> Speaking of backups, on OSR 5.0.7, I've installed a SCSI Iomega REV
>>> drive.  A complete backup which took 62 minutes to a DDS-4 tape
>>> takes 20 minutes to a REV drive.
>>
>> We have one of those too on our new box but I don't have a way to
>> make a good comparison like that.
>
> Yes, you do. See below.
>
>> Old box didn't have dds-4 but dds-3 and the tape was on a 20 or
>> 40mhz scsi card while the rev is on udma 100 or 133 IDE.
>
> Not on OpenServer. Not exactly.
>
>> Old box let the tape drive do the compression, new box per-force
>> must do the compression in cpu. Old box had a plain 80mhz or u160
>> scsi drive on a ordinary 33mhz x 32bit pci card, new box has a
>> raid-10 array of u320 drives spread over 2 u320 channels on a 133mhz
>> x 64bit pci-x card etc etc etc...
>>
>> It's taking me 3:45 hours to back up and 4:05 to verify 54 gigs.
>> which is compressing down to only 17 gigs of raw media space!
>>
>> ---snip BackupEDGE summary---
>> Files Encountered      = 757032
>> Total Data             = 54.48GB
>> Data Written           = 17.18GB
>> Volume Left            = 15.40GB
>> SW Compression         = 76%
>> Elapsed Time           = 03:47:39
>> Data Transfer Speed    = 1351477 bytes/sec
>> Net Transfer Rate      = 77.11 MB/min
>> --------
>>
>> This includes about 4 gigs of jpegs and pngs (scanned documents that
>> are already highly compressed)
>> and about 42 gigs of customers bacups, mostly in the form of
>> complete rsync copies of customers filepro trees (just the menus,
>> config & filepro dir, no binaries) and a few sets of compressed tars
>> that revolve every night. The tars are bzip2 but the rsync'ed trees
>> are straight fp and very compressible.
>>
>> What I do have for comparison is the ctar summary from the old box,
>> which due to the smaller media had a lot of things excluded from the
>> backup... ----snip----
>>         FILES: 236725
>>         Total DATA: 8.026Gb (Gigabytes)
>>         Actual Tape Data Written: 8.185Gb (Gigabytes)
>>         ROOM LEFT on this Volume: 15.253Gb (Gigabytes)
>>
>>         Elapsed Time:  42 minutes  53 seconds
>>         Data Transfer Speed: 3420199 bytes/sec  ( 195.7 Mb/min)
>> ----snip----
>>
>> I'm almost positive that someone somewhere told me that the rev was
>> faster than dat, (I don't remember if it was backupedge or seneca
>> data, or who...) but... this shows the old std-9000 drive working
>> twice as fast as the rev.
>
> NO, It DOESN'T!
>
>> So all in all, I'm pretty dissapointed.
>
> You should be ecstatic. I don't think you have interprested the
> statistics properly.

you are right...
near the top of the ctar log file is the total capacity of the tape, 23 gigs 
& change (which is just a number I myself  put in since it's the estimated 
compressed space)

For some reason that number stuck in my head and I was thinking that the old 
box was backing up 23 1/2 gigs in 42 minutes
but there is no question, it was only backing up 8 gigs in 42 minutes.

So, it's doing better than the old box. But now hearing about Johns tape 
being off it's stride and doing only 700 megs/min, that 77 sounds pretty 
lame. But the rev cost something like $450 and I don't even wanna think what 
an ait drive goes for. :)

Just for the record, even when I thought it was performing badly, I never 
thought it was the software, strictly hardware.
I quite like backupedge and it's especially cool that the rev drive looks 
like a cd or dvd to the bios and so is bootable, and how backupedge just 
cranks out a iso image and tacks it on the front of the backup so that every 
backup is bootable and contains it's own copy of recoveredge and so all you 
need to restore the whole box from scratch is one solitary rev carttridge, 
and any one will do.

The rev wasn't available in scsi yet when we ordered our box else we'd 
definitely have gotten that.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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