bpimagelist results are not complete. (missing entries)

Try the -idonly option instead of the -media option if you want to compare bpmedialist with the BAR GUI.

Thanks for your help and prompt reply!

It's very interesting but not the output I am looking for. That does give me a list of dates that appears to include the dates missing from my first attempt. It does not give me a correlating Media ID to match up with that date.

What I want is very simple. I need to know what tape to put in the robot for a range of dates. Currently my scope is every tape ever written for this server and a record of what that covers. Traceability. This tape was made on this day. There should be a nice auto-generating report for something as common as this. Don't we all want to have a list of what tapes were made on what day? Even if you have a hand written log, I would want to correlate my log with what is actually in the Netbackup catalog. Wouldn't you? Verification? Traceability? Isn't this an important feature?

This also doesn't explain why some of the dates are missing from the -media command.

I am wondering if the GUI is probably Case INsensitive where cmd is definately case sensitive.

Check the /usr/openv/netbackup/db/images to see if there is more than one folder name for the client.

an incomplete list of days and tapes?"

Is it just the fact that the bpimagelist is showing the LAST time it was used?

e.g.

Media ID   Last Written      
--------   ----------------   ----------
300176     05/18/2011 18:33  
300577     05/18/2011 18:00  
300651     05/18/2011 08:00  
300114     05/17/2011 18:30  
300112     05/17/2011 08:00  

from the above output 300651 is "apparently" missing from the output for 17th May as it was also used on the 18th. GUI shows correct tapes for 18th as above and also 300112, 300114 and 300651 for the 17th.

Or have you already taken that into account?

Andy is correct,

I cannot see any inconsistancy in the application.  I have tested this left, right and centre today.  I can however see that the command, although I believe it is  workling correctly, is not meeting your expectations. 

So, how about this ...The way I think to achive what you want ...

bpmedialist -l |awk '{print $1}' |while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
bpimmedia -mediaid $LINE |grep IMAGE |awk '{print $4}'
done
 

Giving me the correct results ...

TAPE04
womble_1305812840
womble_1305811981
TAPE05
womble_1305814567
womble_1305814384

Martin

This is a good explanation and is consistent with the entries I am missing. However this behaviour is certainly undesireable. The information written to that tape on the different days could be completely different. My understanding of the command is that it should look through all images and report Media IDs and dates within the range specified but that would be a literal interpretation of the command syntax. Which is foolish I suppose.

I want all entries. Nothing should be omitted.   

is to run the command over several iterations for each individual day, but that could also be undesirable if you're looking at a long period of time!!

I did have a script that did something similar, have to check when I'm back at work tomorrow (it probably does contain the odd 'awk' tho'!)

Again, as I'm not at work & can't remember the exact format of them, are there any of the "Reports" that cover what you want? They can be exported to a s/sheet....I think, or is that somewhere else?

....hmmm, could be....

from

DOCUMENTATION: The command line equivalents for running the NetBackup reports available in the NetBackup user interface
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH20462

Media Written Report
The Media Written report identifies volumes that were used for backups within the specified time period.  
# cd /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd
# ./bpimagelist -A -media [-d <start_date> <start_time> -e <end_date> <end_time>]

no apparent client option here, but maybe there is a drop-down available on the GUI. Maybe worth checking all the media-type reports out?

What about OpsCenter - this is the 'NetBackup Reporting tool' - I cannot say I'm an expert in OpsCenter, but I'm goig to be very very brave and suggest that I would image it can do what you want.

Certaining, OpsCenter with Analytics (which is the bit that you pay for) is very powerful with the ability to create custom SQL reports.  Although charable, this is in line with other vendors.

The base OpsCenter is free.

Martin

Okay so,

There are 3 ways I have used so far to get information about what the catalog has availble to restore. All of them give slightly different results.

1.  If you go to the BAR GUI you can click on each image in each day one by one and select "preview media" and it will show you the tapes you need but you can't copy that data out to text. If you select multiple images by holding shift then the media ID shown in the preview is often the last one you clicked on and does not show all the tapes required to actually restore the data you selected. This is not only inefficient but completely impractical once you have run over 800 backups. However, I have always assumed that the list of available backups here is complete. Until now.

2. You can use the various outputs from bpimagelist to get different degrees of completeness, some of which are compatible with a database and some of which would require extensive reformatting to be usefull for any sort of records keeping. Information about tapes that have been written to multiple times may be missing.

3. (Admin Console) NetBackup Management > Reports > Tape Reports > Images on tape. This is where it gets strange. If you query a server name and leave the media ID blank you get a good combination of customizable data regarding backups in the catalog. This is the closest to being useful but raises more questions. It is a far more complete list than using #2 (bpimagelist) however there are some inconsistancies again. There are entries that bpimagelist shows that are not on the images on tape list and that is disturbing.

What is far worse is that there is one entry that shows up in the "images on tape" list that is not available from the BAR GUI or bpimagelist. This is unacceptable because if you were using the GUI you would not be able to recover this data. This image is not expired and should be the same Policy type as the others.

On a related note. There is a column for "policy type" in the images on tape list that should correspond to the "policy type" dropdown selector in the BAR GUI. This feild is blank. The policy type is Lotus Notes but you couldn't tell that from this report. Just blank. It was a good idea but nobody bothered to make it work.

The bottom line is that none of these methods can agree with eachother about what tapes and what days are available. Making tapes is great but eventually someone will want to get the data off of the tapes, right? That is why we make them. Perhaps 100% accountability and traceability is asking too much. I know, I am a pickey bastard and I complain too much.

I don't speak awk. Perhaps I should. The output I really need is just like the output that the command I issued gives, except complete. I need the Media ID in one column and the Date right next to it, in another column. This is functional to restoration. What tapes do you need to pull for what days? There are ways I can do this with the output from multiple commands and lots of scripting but it is rediculous that I should have to. Especially when the output from the existing commands is so close. bpimagelist has access to all the information I need but it simply won't display it all at the same time. It's frustrating. We pay good money for a backup solution and in order to provide simple data traceability the answer I keep finding is "Write some code to do that". Isn't that what we pay Symantec to do? Write the code?

The information in the BAR GUI? Yeah, I want a text version of it for records that would import easily in to a proper database(or spreadsheet) because the program itself is lacking a proper database. Seems so simple.