Send catalog vault offsite?

Hi,

Have you gone through the steps to create a Vault Catalog Backup Schedule in your current catalog backup (or a new catalog backup) policy?

Check the vault admin guide for details.

I do have a policy set using the NBU-Catalog policy and it does back up to tape but how do I get that data offsite on one of my existing vault jobs?  I enabled Catalog Backup on one of my vault jobs but I do not see the catalog on that tape when running the Images on Tape report or by looking at the Picking List for Robot report.  I also see the following in the Vault Status report:

Session STEP Information

RVP = Daily_Vault_Profile

SID = 2230

STEP = catalog_backup

StartTime = 2011.01.30 01:05:15 (1296367515)

Catalog Backup step succeeded!

Session STEP COMPLETE

End Time :2011.01.30 01:31:35 (1296369095)

Hi,

What types of schedule have you configured in the hot catalog backup policy? Does the policy contain a "Vault Catalog Backup" schedule?

You also need to make sure that your catalog backup is going to a Volume Pool that is specified in your vault policy ejection settings as an off-site volume pool.  For example, I write my Vault Catalog Backups to a volume pool called VltCat-Offsite. It is included on the Eject tab in my Vault Profile.

The type of backup in the schedule is set to Vault Catalog Backup.  I will take a look at kenrblan's suggestion because I don't believe I am doing what he/she suggested.

Hi,

Good, now just make sure you've created a seperate pool for the offsite vaults. Then on the next tab (Eject), make sure you specify the offsite vault pool so its ejects the tapes containing the offsite vault catalog backup.

Thanks!  The part I was missing was adding the off-site pool to the eject tab.  I checked this morning and it worked.

One concern though, it appears my latest catalog is now going offsite.  Is this going to be a problem?  I thought I read somewhere to make a copy of the catalog and to send one offsite and keep one in the library.

This is not a problem. Set the policy schedule for run each 12 hours. You will have 2 onsite catalog and 1 offsite catalog for the vault job.

Thanks for the replies everyone.  The more I look at this the more confused I get.  How often does everyone sent their vault catalog offsite?  Daily seems a bit much to me and once a week doesn't seem like enough.  I have daily, weekly and monthly vault jobs.  I'm not sure which one I should attach Catalog Backup to.  As for my primary copy going offiste, I read the following on page 45 of the Vault Administrators Guide for 6.5.6.  I don't know how to ensure that my primary copies on removable media remain on site in the robot.

Designate a primary copy and keep it on site

The first (or only) original backup image is the primary backup copy. NetBackup always uses the primary copy for restore operations, and Vault uses the primary copy for duplication operations (unless the primary copy is on removable media and another copy exists on disk). Ensure that primary copies on removable media remain on site in your robot. If the primary copy is off site, a user initiated restore operation will wait indefinitely for a mount of the off-site media.  If you create multiple original backups during a NetBackup policy job, do not assign the primary copy to an off-site volume pool unless you intend to send it off site. If you assign the primary copy to an off-site volume pool, it will be ejected and will not be available for restore or duplication operations.  If your Vault profile duplicates media and you send the first original off site, configure Vault to designate one of the duplicate images that remain on site as the primary copy.

Hi,

Regarding the catalog backup going offsite. You should have (at least) two schedules in your policy, one for Full (onsite), and one for Vault Catalog backup. The Full schedule will use the catalog backup pool, and the second schedule should be set to "override volume pool" and point to the Offsite Catalog Backup pool. This way you get two distinct copies, one for onsite, and one for offsite. The Vault job will target the offsite catalog backup pool when it ejects, thus leaving your onsite tape alone.

The two schedules can be run independantly and as frequently as you wish.

The question of sending catalog tapes offsite comes down to how much money you're willing to spend on catalog tapes. Obviously the best protection level would be to send one with every single batch of tapes you vault, but that means one a day multiplied by the retention period. This could easily mean a 180 tapes (daily 6 month retention for instance).

What you can also do is have the catalogs on a shorter retention i.e. 7 days, so they'll go offsite each day (maximum protection) but return within a week. So you only need 7. Just have a seperate canister for the catalog tapes that your offsite company collects/returns daily.

The primary copy will always be the first copy that NetBackup wrote. So unless you've select "make this copy primary" the first tape (in the onsite pool) will be primary. This isn't hard to change either so don't worry too much about it.