Question : Problem: Backing up lots of small files.  (IE,10GB of 250,000 small files) -- Ideas?

We need to execute a nightly back-up that will copy files from one server to another.  We've tried NTBACKUP (included with Windows), scripts, batch files, etc.  However the we have nearly 250,000 files that are close to 10GB in total.

With that said, the back-up takes about 5 hours over gigatbit, with SCSI drives on each end.  We hardly use .5% of the network during the transfer.  

We've tried zipping and compressing also then transferring, but this has failed too.  Any ideas?  

We only have one LTO drive, so we need to move to another server.


Thanks!

Answer : Problem: Backing up lots of small files.  (IE,10GB of 250,000 small files) -- Ideas?

it makes a file (or group of files because you can say you want to keep the backup files at a certain size, like 1 or 2 GB which is usefull if you later need to copy the backup to some media that doesn't support large filesizes, and it is also usefull for restores if the backup file corrupts). These files can then be restored using BE.