NovaStor Said to Beat Competition in One Million Small File Backup Challenge

NovaStor AG has completed a round of internal testing on the effectiveness of common backup solutions when faced with the task of backing up millions of small files.

This test was performed to rate efficiency in a scenario in which less efficient backup software may struggle to complete successfully within a limited backup window.

With small businesses requiring critical data protection across a wide range of environments, NovaStor engineers have received requests globally to enhance the NovaBACKUP product line to meet specific customer requirements.

One such environment is where a customer must backup and protect a large number of small files in a single backup job within a given amount of time. This scenario frequently results in much longer backup times than backup jobs consisting of fewer large files, with an equal total size. Small and fragmented files will often affect the performance of backup software due to a number of factors, including the resource overhead required to open files, read the metadata, allocate, and to record data for each and every file. A large portion of disk activity may simply be spent searching for the location of the next file, rather than actually performing the backup.

Performing a complete system or image backup of all files is one way to address this issue, but it may not be appropriate or sufficient in all cases.

This has prompted NovaStor to put common backup products to the task of performing a backup for one million small files in a single backup job while measuring and examining the results:

• Time to Complete Backup: NovaBACKUP Business Essentials 16 – Time Elapsed: 23 minutes, 46s Competitor A – 33 minutes, 7s Competitor B – 54 minutes, 45s NovaBACKUP completed the task faster than the competing products, offering backup administrators greater flexibility when developing their backup strategy. Businesses must consider the amount of time they have available to complete backup of critical data, and which solution offers them the ability to meet this window.
• Peak CPU Usage: NovaBACKUP Business Essentials 16 – 13.7 % Competitor A – 30% Competitor B – 100% While the occasional CPU spike may be acceptable to some administrators, the taxing of a CPU and how it responds to load may be indicative of further performance issues.
• Peak Memory Usage: NovaBACKUP Business Essentials 16 – 0.5% Competitor A – 13.5% Competitor B – 10.5% NovaBACKUP again exceeded expectations in the category of peak memory usage. With available resources at a premium for small businesses, backup software must be efficient enough to complete the task at hand without intervention by the administrator.

While many backup solutions call for a dedicated server as part of their minimum requirements, the efficiency of NovaBACKUP and its ability to function in environments with shared resources comes as a welcome relief for many network administrators.