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snawaz3's avatar
snawaz3
Level 6
12 years ago
Solved

Bpmedialist

Hi Guys. I have not yet become fully profecient with one system that management have given me another system to fix and manage. You guys have been great and I really appreciate it. This new system NDUS is setup differently from the one I have been working with you guys on. This does not have vaulting configured. This system does not have any SAN disk attached. All backups are being done directly to tape. I need help in setting this up in such a way that the tapes can be reused for daily-differential, weekly-full, and monthly-full backups.

My aim is:

to have retention levels for the images for the daily-differential be set to 1 week and hope to reuse the tapes after 1 week.

to have the retential levels for the images for the weekly-full be set to 5 weeks and hope to reuse the tapes after 5 weeks

to have the retential levels for the images for the monthly-full be set to 1 year and hope to take these tapes out for off line storage and replace them with new tapes.

I am reading up on this in the Netbackup Admin Guides but it gets a little confusing at times and i want to make the changes with as little interuption as possible.

Thanks

  • There is no automated way to suspend media (unless you eject tapes from the robot every day using vault)  - you will need to do it manually (or script and schedule it).

    Again - if retention level is 7 days, chances are that tapes will not be expired by the time next Monday's backups need to start. See my post above...

  • hey..

    how many policies you have in this master server... ?

    do you have SLP in place?

    what it the version of Master server?

     

    below are your tasks:-

    1) gather info for above questions

    2) make sure that allow multiple retenctions are not configued for your tapes

    3) check and make sure that you have retenction level avaliable for 1 week, 5 weeks and 1 year form master server host properties.

    then start moving your policies to new retenctions.

    the qucik way is to create  3 SLPs for  each daily, weekly and Monthly backups and then assing those to all your schedules.( if futher it will be easy to manage the retenctions if you go with SLP)

    you can also use different volumes pools for each daily, weekly and monthly backups.

    go ahead and gather the info and let us know if you stuck somewhere.

  • Answers to your questions:

    policies on master/media server(the same server)  = 31

    SLP  =  no

    version =  7.1.0.4

    multiple retentions were configured = unchecked the box

    retention levels available in master host properties

    what do mean when you say moving policies to new retentions?

    THANKS

  • ... to have retention levels for the images for the daily-differential be set to 1 week and hope to reuse the tapes after 1 week.

    This is what happens in real life:

    Backups are configured to start at 7pm. 
    Very seldom do backups start at 7pm. They start shortly after 7 - some go active and some queue. 
    Backups start throughout the night and keep on adding images to the same tape. Last backup to same tape starts the next morning at 6am.
    Say this is Saturday morning 20 April.
    This means that the last image on tape will only expire on Saturday morning 27 April at 06:00. Add to this the fact that NBU only runs image cleanup every 12 hours.

    So, there is no way that this tape will be available next Friday 26 April at 7pm. If you put tape back in the robot, NBU will try to append to the last image and not overwrite from beginning of tape.

    Always best to add an extra set of tapes to your daily, weekly, monthly calculations.

    Hope this helps.

     

  • excellent point. what I meant was I want NBU to reuse the tapes that are in the daily pool. i do not want to at this point remove any tapes from the robot. let me relay a scenario.

    I setup a daily schedule. It consumes 3 tapes from the netbackup pool/scratch pool on monday. The retention is set for 1 week.

    On tuesday will NBU pull more more tapes from the default pool or will it continue from tape number 3 and pull tapes as needed. I assume it will not write to these tapes but will pull new tapes from the default pool.

    It will continue pulling new tapes for wednesday and thursday. on friday i do a weekly backup

    come next monday the images from previous monday should have expired ( they were set to expire 1 week ) and NBU should be able to resuse mondays tape. and so on for each day of the week?

    comments please

  • Please have a look at the blog that I posted in your other discussion.

    As long as Daily pool tapes remain in the library, NBU will append to tapes that are not full yet rather than taking from Scratch.
    It will keep on appending until tape is full. 
    So, it is possible to have backups from more than one day on the same tape. 
    Although images on beginning of tape expires a week later, there are still unexpired images from subsequent days. Space from expired images cannot be reclaimed/reused. 
    Tape can only be reused/overwritten when ALL images have expired.

    Link to blog once again: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/understanding-how-netbackup-writes-tape

  • thanks for the info. Is there any way I can suspend the tapes after they have been written to on monday. in that way NBU will have to write to new tapes on tuesday and so on. come next monday the images will have expired on mondays tape. will NBU then be able to pick mondays tapes?

  • There is no automated way to suspend media (unless you eject tapes from the robot every day using vault)  - you will need to do it manually (or script and schedule it).

    Again - if retention level is 7 days, chances are that tapes will not be expired by the time next Monday's backups need to start. See my post above...