Dell NetWorker 19.9 Administration Guide

Overview

The NetWorker block based backups are high-performance backups which are supported on Windows and Linux.

During block based backups, the backup application scans a volume or a disk in a file system, and backs up all the blocks that are in use in the file system. Block based backups use the following technologies:

• The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot capability on Windows and Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) on Linux to create consistent copies of the source volume for backups.
• The Virtual Hard Disk (VHDx), which is sparse, to back up data to the target device.

Block based backups support only the following Client Direct enabled devices as target devices:

• Advanced File Type Devices (AFTDs)
• Data Domain devices
• Cloud Boost devices
• Smart Scale devices

The block based incremental backups use the Change Block Tracking (CBT) driver to identify the changed blocks, and back up only the changed blocks.

Block based full and incremental backups are fast backups with reduced backup times because the backup process backs up only the occupied disk blocks and changed disk blocks respectively. Block based backups can coexist with traditional backups.

Block based backups provide instant access to the backups. The block based backups enable you to mount the backups by using the same file systems that you used to back up the data.

Block based backups provide the following capabilities:

• Mounting of a backup as a file system
• Mounting of an incremental backup
• Sparse backup support
• Backups to disk-like devices
• Backups of operating system-deduplicated file systems as source volumes on Windows
• Forever virtual full backups to Data Domain
• Data Domain retention lock
• 38 incremental backups to AFTD and Cloud Boost devices
• Synthetic full backups to AFTD and Cloud Boost devices
• Backups of volumes up to 63 TB each
• NetWorker-supported devices as secondary devices for backups
• Recoveries from Data Domain without using CIFS share
• Recovery of multiple save sets in a single operation
• Setting parallel save streams if the target or destination is Data Domain

The following table lists the backup scenarios and the recovery scenarios that block based backups support.