210609 De-Duplication Database baselining

This Problem is Live

Problem Statement

The live de-duplication database requires re-baselining to ensure all de-duplication chunks are maintained in a single database.

FAQ’s

What’s the impact on my data?

Only jobs that have extended retention periods will be affected.

For those jobs, any data that was created immediately before the backup job and destroyed immediately after it, i.e. data that only existed for one night and was then deleted entirely, will no longer be retained by that backup job.

This is common practice for retaining data out to stop storage bloat and as such, jobs with lower retention periods will be retained out as normal and no data is affected.

Will it cost me more in Storage or Licensing?

The new jobs will not add net new storage and will not affect your licensing costs. The new jobs are only re-baselining the data the affected jobs.

Will it increase resource utilization, e.g. CPU utilization, on my environment?

There may be a small increase in utilization but we are throttling this. If you do experience any adverse effects please let the BackupSimple team know through the normal channels and we will work to accommodate you.

What jobs will you run and when?

We have been running the jobs already and we would like to continue to do so. We have seen no adverse effects and no customers have raised concerns, but if you do experience any issues please let us know immediately.

The table below shows the jobs affected and the actions we would like to run in your environment.

Cause

During scheduled Vendor Maintenance on the Backup System the De-Duplication database became split-brained due to unexpected routing to a secondary database. De-duplication chunks were then split across two databases and the primary database now needs to be re-baselined to the 9th June 2021

Impact

Only jobs that have extended retention periods will be affected.

For those jobs, any data that was created immediately before the backup job and destroyed immediately after it, i.e. data that only existed for one night and was then deleted entirely, will no longer be retained by that backup job.

Mitigation

A new series of Baselining Jobs, a standard Differential, will be run to realign the split-brain chunks to the primary database

Timeline

The following table gives a timeline of events throughout the problem