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Johncu's avatar
Johncu
Level 3
16 years ago

Migrate LT0-1 Media to LTO-4

Hi

I have a lot of aging LTO-1 media from a decommissioned Netbackup system that won't expire for a number of years.
 
I have been asked to migrate this media to LT0-4 media in a new Netbackup system.

I have no problem importing the media, and I know that the original retention of the images will be set from the date of import on the new system.

I have a library that has 4 LT0-4 drives, and one LTO-3 drive which can be used for reading in the old LTO-1 tapes.

I would like to know the best way of moving the backup images from the LTO-1 media to LTO-4, if possable utilizing the larger capactity of the LTO-4 tapes, cutting down the overall number of tapes.

I am running NBU 6.5.4 with a stand alone Master server and 6 Media servers, all Redhat. I have the Advanced disk option if it helps.

Many thanks in advince for any sugestions.

John
7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Tip-How to
  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    16 years ago
    Maybe somebody will say that I'm digging old graves but here is excellent whitepaper (VERITAS BRANDED!!!):

    BEST PRACTICES: MIGRATING TO OR INTEGRATING NEW TAPE DRIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN EXISTING LIBRARIES
    exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/281314.pdf

    My personal opinion that if your NBU is not aware of those tapes, you cannot skip the import phase. The best option is obviously to copy your tapes to the new generation of tapes but it's really depends of number of such tapes, some of our customers have thousands of them so it's practically impossible for them, so they keeping couple of drives just for recovery purposes.

    Read whitepaper first, it will give you an idea where to go.

  • Andy_Welburn's avatar
    Andy_Welburn
    Level 6
    16 years ago
    although it involved images that were already on the system (so we did not have to worry about importing).

    Basically, we replaced our aging LTO1 library/tapes with LTO3 & in the main allowed our LTO1 images to expire gracefully. There were, however, a few that we intended to keep indefinitely so decided to duplicate them onto the new LTO3s.

    We changed one of our LTO3 drives from HCART3 to HCART (so no 800 error codes) and also a new volume pool to prevent any confusion. Then through the catalog facility identified all the images we wished to duplicate. Set the duplication going & left it to it. The process continued to write to LTO3 tapes until full & then loaded the next - so subsequently reducing the total number of tapes originally utilised.
  • Nicolai's avatar
    Nicolai
    Moderator
    16 years ago

    I am not a expert in media migration, but as far as I know you can duplicate media's or Images. Duplicating media's  won't reduce the number of  tapes so go for image duplication (like Andy suggest indirect).
  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    Moderator
    16 years ago
    Maybe somebody will say that I'm digging old graves but here is excellent whitepaper (VERITAS BRANDED!!!):

    BEST PRACTICES: MIGRATING TO OR INTEGRATING NEW TAPE DRIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN EXISTING LIBRARIES
    exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/281314.pdf

    My personal opinion that if your NBU is not aware of those tapes, you cannot skip the import phase. The best option is obviously to copy your tapes to the new generation of tapes but it's really depends of number of such tapes, some of our customers have thousands of them so it's practically impossible for them, so they keeping couple of drives just for recovery purposes.

    Read whitepaper first, it will give you an idea where to go.

  • Alex_Korovin's avatar
    Alex_Korovin
    Level 4
    16 years ago
    This whitepaper is really what you'r looking for, I have migrated LTO1 to LTO4 at IBM library two week ago after reading this manual