A few weeks ago, I was at a customer meeting to discuss our Arcserve UDP solution and how this helps to protect their data when the customer asked us if we have a solution to help them to manage growth in their file servers. At the time, their file servers were growing to a 40TB server and they didn’t want to delete files as they might be needed at one point. However, it became more difficult for them to manage the file server. The good news for them was that indeed Arcserve was able to help them.
Not many people know that Arcserve UDP has a little gem that serves exactly this purpose. UDP can archive files from production storage to a lower cost storage or even to AWS S3 or Azure blob. And the best news is this feature is standard! The customer was pleasantly surprised as it would save them a significant amount money to not add additional disks in their primary storage but also not invest in an expensive file archiving solution.
UDP file archive is a simple and easy-to-use feature that archives the files depending on the filters set and will leave text stub behind once the file is archived. This stub contains retrieval data so when a user clicks on the stub, it will display a notification to contact the local IT department to retrieve the file, and it includes session information for IT where the file is located for easy retrieval. The text in the stub file can be configured, but more on that later.
So, let’s have a look at this file archive feature within UDP. Requirements include:
- Arcserve UDP
- UDP agent installed on a Windows-based server
- Disk location or cloud account to store archived files
In my example, I installed an agent on a server that I am protecting in a plan. I have one folder that I like to archive off.
This folder has 1.2GB inside of it, and I will setup a task to archive everything off larger than 4MB in this example.
When an agent is installed, you have the option to add the task “File Archive.”
The first thing to do is to add a source path and indicate what folder(s) would you like to archive.
I will archive the folder “c:\files” and the first filter I configure is that the archive applies to all files and folders at the source. You can be creative here and set different parameters, such as certain files types.
I will filter further by file size in my example and set it up for files larger than 4MB.
Under the file size filter, you can set the file age filter and set the parameter to not accessed, not modified, and/or not created in X days, months, or years.
Once set, you see the settings in the source tab and you can amend the settings again by clicking on the source path.
The next step is to set the destination. You can choose to use a network share or cloud storage as your archive location.
You can directly send archived files to the several cloud locations, such as AWS S3 and Azure.
For my example I will use a network share that I have configured in my lab environment. You can set the compression, encryption (256 AES), and retention time for the files.
Note: At the end of the specified retention time when the data is purged from the destination, all of this moved data is no longer stored or saved.
Once set, I can setup the schedule, which runs independent from the backup task. You can then run it daily or monthly on certain days of week or month.
Now that this is all set, it is time to change the default notification text of the stub that is replacing the archived file.
Edit the file: C:\Program Files\Arcserve\Unified Data Protection\Engine\Configuration\FileCopyDebugSetting.xml
Add the following line under the <AFArchiveDLL>:
<ArchiveStubFileText> New Text can be added here to display in stub file </ArchiveStubFileText>
<
In my example, I changed mine to:
Now that the archive is set, you can check on the progress while a job runs or check the logs after a job has finished running.
Once finished, I can see that 28 files have been archived and freed up 1.164 GB in my production environment.
Let’s look at the file location itself and you will notice that the files are replaced by test stub files. The files will have the following name: filename.UDP.txt.
And when you open an archived file you will get the following notification:
Here you can see the text you added, and the info needed for the IT department to retrieve the file.
File retrieval: To get a file back to the user, you can click on the server inside the UDP Console and click on Browse File Copies.
You can then add the file location, or if you have just one archive location it comes up default.
Locate the file to retrieve and click Next.
Select where to restore this file - original location or somewhere else - and click Next.
Start restoring the file by checking the summary and click Finish.
Once finished, you can check the logs and/or check the location.
And as you can see, the file is recovered back.
After the archive and restore in my example, I checked the size of the folder. Prior to the archive, the folder size was 1.21GB. After the archive, it is 51.8MB.
As you can see, this is a nice feature to have to help save costs on the primary storage and archive files of to a more affordable location. My customer was very pleased with this solution as it saved him a lot of money at the end of the day.
I hope you found this post useful and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
