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We have a terastation II pro used to store drive images from a windows server - that part works swell.

 

The image files are large - the largest being around 69 gigs.   The terastation is raid 5 with a net size of 2TB.  The total in the backup area is about 200 gigs.

 

We use the backup software in the terastation to backup the drive images from the terastation share to usb disk.  The usb disk is 1 TB.

 

The terastation backup worked well when the largest image was around 66 gigs - backup it up in a couple of hours.  But it can't backup this file at 69 gigs in under a day.  I don't know how long it would take exactly cause we haven't let it finish - but we guess it would take 40 days.

 

Is there a known file size limit?

   As it stands it take about 5-7 minutes per gig when transfering files. Short of transfering a terabyte at one time there isn't a cap.

   

I'd like to add some more detail.

 

First, I can do a simple windows or os copy of a very large file from the terastation to either USB Disk used for backup and it works fine.  The problem occurs ONLY when using the terastation backup software.

 

Second, I can (and did) breakup the original files into smaller segments.   That seems to produce random errors sometimes:

sbackup/driveg/drive_g.041
rsync: read errors mapping "/mnt/array1/sbackup/driveg/drive_g.041": No data available (61)

is a good sample.  When this error occurrs, the job may or may not continue.  In this exact case, job continued to process the remaining files in the exact directory, but then appears to have gotten stuck and not processed the next directory.  Job hasn't completed and won't!

 

Job writes a new directory each day.  Disk is about 1 tb with 451 gb in use - so its not out of disk space.  Both USB disks are about 2 months old.

Another good point to raise would be what firmware version you're running.

   

TS-HTGL/R5 F/W 1.33 - Terastation Pro II (2tb) running as raid 5.  Firmware is 1.33 (Nov 2008).

 

Terastation is formatted with xfs.  Terastation successfully operates as active directory integrated.    It's used by exactly one server as backup space.

 

It has two defined shares.  One is a mirror containing copies of user files for easily accessible file recovery.  The second share is the storage for server drive images.  The softwares creating either set of backups generally don't experience issues - well, except for the time the user realized that they had used a surge supression only outlet on their UPS.

 

The share containing the drive images is backed up using the terastation software to USB disks and transported offsite weekly.   The terastation is shutdown to change the drives.

 

Terastation backup runs for about 7 hours.  The terastation is NOT in use by the server or the users while backup is running.

It could have to do with the TeraStation allocating the necessary storage for the amount of disk space to be used for each individual file. The problem with this is that with 200 GB of small files the TS needs to allocate and sync it's data across the 4 drives including the writing of the parity data. The flipside is that 200 GB of large files means the TS needs to process more data to be written to the drives. That coupled with the fact the RAID once again needs to allocate the necessary space also can lead to slow transfer speed. Another question to raise would be what are the two USB drives formatted in?

   

USB disks are formatted in xfs also - by the terastation.

 

So, it's been running for a week using the smaller size files (640 MB each) without issue.  I changed their procedures so they down the terastation when swapping the USB drives - AKA weekly restart.   7 days fit on the usb disk - i imagine its more effective allocation.

 

Again, currently the backup runs 7 hours and backups up about 110 gigs  - pretty consistant timings.