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markdavies1978's avatar
markdavies1978
Level 5
14 years ago
Solved

Offsite Tape Rotation

Hi all,

I'm after some adive with regards the above.

Currently I maintain a fairly robust spreadsheet where I record all completed policies against the tape barcode & our offsite storage company's barcode.

I also make a note of all tapes which have expired or due to expire & then submit a list to our offsite storage company & they return the tapes.

I don't think the above is particulary slick, I had a look at Vault but due to budget cuts this is now not an option.

Any tips & advice would be great.

Cheers,

Mark

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  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    14 years ago

    Have you had a look yet at 'Media Summary' or 'Tape Summary' report? Run the report in Verbose mode.
    This report can be used to know when tapes must come back.

    Also have a look at Tapes Written report for tape selection to be sent off-site on a daily basis.

    Another useful report is 'available_media' that can be run from cmd and output sent to a text file. (in netbackup\bin\goodies)

  • Omar_Villa's avatar
    Omar_Villa
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    You can create a script based on the images or tapes expirations, there are some good reports that can help you with this and you only need to do some sed's and awk's to mail you this daily so you will know what expires daily and recall or eject whatever is needed, this was the all vault way before Vault was created, automate your spreadsheet and you will be free every morning and only worrie about your tapes.

    Start with: bpmedialist -U

     

    Regards.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    Have you had a look yet at 'Media Summary' or 'Tape Summary' report? Run the report in Verbose mode.
    This report can be used to know when tapes must come back.

    Also have a look at Tapes Written report for tape selection to be sent off-site on a daily basis.

    Another useful report is 'available_media' that can be run from cmd and output sent to a text file. (in netbackup\bin\goodies)

  • markdavies1978's avatar
    markdavies1978
    Level 5
    14 years ago

    Thanks Marianne.

    I currently have a script which outputs to a text file each morning so all is good there.

    As for the 'Tape Summary' report this could help.me moving fwd so thanks for pointing out this report.

    1 thing I noticed in the above report though is that it is not listing as many expired tapes as I was expecting, I have around 3000 tapes held offsite!

  • J_H_Is_gone's avatar
    J_H_Is_gone
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    Every offsite storage company I have worked with allows me to submit the return date when I send them the tapes  - does yours allow this?

    Example.

    Monday night backups - I take the out of the lib.  then depending on the company and how we submit - I would either list the return date for the tub, or when I used their software to upload the media I could fill out the return date.  As I know what the retention is for my Monday backups I know when the return date should be so I just put that in the software for all the tapes I am sending off site.  Some times I have 'special' tapes and might need to put in a different date for that tape,  but I have never had to submit a list to the storage company each day telling them what tapes to send back.   So I suggest you talk to them and see what options they have for automatic returns.