About duplicating tapes or cloning tapes

[DiegoRS]

Good morning to everybody!
I have a need and I would like to know if it is possible to solve it.
I have a backup stored on physical tapes, which is very important to the business.

For auditing purposes, it is often required to restore the backups that are on those tapes. But due to business protocols, it is not possible to leave the tapes inside the library forever. Worflow is:

- Restoration is requested
- Tapes are ordered from the supplier
- Tapes are placed in the library
- Data is restored
- Tapes are removed and delivered to the supplier.

So, I would like to know if it is possible to "clone" or copy the tape to another physical tape, in this way we can store the "original" tapes in the provider, and we would leave the "cloned" ones in the library for the purposes of frequent restorations.

Is it possible to do this? Or, failing that, is it possible to duplicate the images (stored in a tape) onto another tape? If possible, I would be grateful if you can guide me.

In short, we are asked to have a 2nd copy of the images that are hosted on tapes, on other tapes.

My environment is:

NetBackup Appliance, NetBackup 8.1.2

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

hi @DiegoRS 

The command you are looking for is bpduplicate

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/doc/123533878-127136857-0/v123537351-127136857

It not the worlds easiest command to work with, so some practice may be required. 

One thing to remember, you need to promote the new copy as new primary copy, else Netbackup will request the current tape for each restore request.

You can also duplicate tape from the GUI, see:

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/NetBackup/how-to-duplicate-the-Netbackup-media-tape-backup-to-another/td-...

duplicating backup is a question frequently asked, so help can be found searching on VOX

[DiegoRS]

Thanks Nicolai!!!!