How solve error "too many sources"?

[segil]

Hello everybody,

We're using Brightstore Arcserve 11.1 to backup our servers. One of the jobs is a copy job, which copies all company data from one fileserver to another fileserver every night for backup purposes.
This company data directory consists of 27.000 directories with 201.000 files (40 GB) and it takes about 4 hours to complete this copy job. The job is configured with the option "Mirror disks".
So far no problem you would think. But since a few weeks I get an message in my activity log saying:

Cannot Mirror Disks - Too many sources

The strange thing is that I got this same error message with Arcserve 9 and I was hoping that it would be solved with version 11. The first 5-6 months it was working great, until a few weeks ago. The copy jobs continues, but the disks aren't mirrored, meaning that the target disk is getting bigger and filled with old, obsolete data, until it's running out of space.
It seems Arcserve can't verify/calculate the directory structure of the source and target, because there are just too many directories involved. Has anyone experencied this before? Is there a workaround for that?
What I can think of it excuting a pre-job command, which will delete the target directory, before starting the copy job. But that's tricky, because if the deleting fails, then the copy job won't be activated (I think). And if the copy job crashes, I lose a lot more backup files than without the deleting first.

So can anyone help me out here?

Thanks a lot!

 

[davidmichel]

Might be a problem relating to how the job is setup.

When setting up the job select the whole drive instead of having the tree expanded. Problem could be that with an expanded view all the listed directories are getting packaged as sources. So setting up the job so that only the volume or the parent directory is selected will prevent this problem.

If there are directories or files you want to exclude use a filter to do it.

 

[segil]

Hello Davidmichel,

thanks for your help.. maybe you're right and the package does contain too many directories. I haven't thought about that. You're also right that I need to exclude certain directories. I'll give it a try the way you suggest.
Strange thing though that a backup job doesn't have this problem, while it backs up even more data than this copy job does.
Do you have any idea how the "mirror disk" function works? I think Arcserve first is going to examine the directory structure before copying the files, because the error message appears at the beginning of the job.
Will it then copy/ overwrite all files and delete the remaining files on the target afterwards, that aren't on the source? I'm wondering.

 

[davidmichel]

right, builds the tree and then matches it up to the target.

One side effect of setting up the job the way you had been doing it that can be a very big risk.

when the job is setup by expanding the tree and listing the directories and files, the job is packaged with that tree AS IS!! That means if a new directory is added it will not be included in the job. This will not effect the contents of a directory that is not expanded. The idea is you are telling the program process these specific directories. A new directory is added and because it was not packaged as part of the job it will be skipped.

so by setting up the job by selecting the volume with its tree closed the job is packed so that it will process whatever is in that directory regardless of if it was just added or not. Filters will then take care of excluding unwanted data.

 

[segil]

Hi DavidMichel,

it seems to be working! Last night the new copy job was activated, and the mirror option is working. Instead of the error message, the following message is logged (at the same position in the logfile): Mirror Disk(s)

Thanks.