Data (historical and backups)

I had found this post a little while ago on cleaning up historical data, but I wanted to save blogging about it until I had something real to say about it.  This is that time as it has become very apparent that another one of our Main Tenants should be something to do with data, maybe Data Consumption or Data Usage but SOMETHING because data is just piling up in our systems every day.  Audit data, user data, this data, and that data and how much is being purged, how much can be purged, who has a strategy for keeping track of all of this and where does that fit in with a corporate strategy?

Skip several years later, and the database had grown to be huge for that time. Retrievals were taking longer and longer, and talking to some of the sysadmins late at night around the coffee machine, I learned that the backup was getting too large to even back it up within a week. The application was starting to hit pretty much a ‘brick wall’; it started to fall further and further behind, and something really needed to be done.

Does this sound familiar?  How big is your system?  Has it hit 1 TB?  Are you approaching 5, 10, 50, 100, or more TB of space for your footprint?  How do you approach your backup system?  Do the people that manage your backups tell you when you're having a problem, or do you have to figure it out yourself?  Questions like this are going through my head as I re-read that link because lately in the morning I'm seeing something like this in our new event monitoring alert:

  Waits                                                           Wait Time        Server

 

  Backup: MML create a backup piece           79291.40622    X1

  Backup: sbtbackup                                        3937.101761   X2                  

  Backup: sbtbackup                                      17308.812339   X3

 

This sure seems like our systems are suddenly "wasting" a lot of cycles per hour on backups, especially when these events are from backups that run into our morning several hours and sometimes even into the afternoon.  So begins the investigation!