I am hoping someone has seen this kind of problem before and knows of a solution. I have a client who has file systems filled with lots of small files on the orders of hundreds of millions of files. Running something like a find on filesystem takes the better part of a week so any kind of directory walking backup tool will take even longer to run. The actual data-size for 100M files is on the order of 15TB so there is a lot of data to backup but the data only increases on the order of tens to hundreds of MB a day. Even things like xfsdump take a long time. For example I tried xfsdump on a 50M file set and it took over 2 days to complete. The only thing that seems to be workable is Veeam. It will run an incremental volume snapshot in a few hours a night but I dislike adding proprietary kernel modules into the systems. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||