Backup skill assessment

[ea021e]

Hi,

this is just a request of information, have you ever seen typical questions to assess the backup knowledge of a technician? I am trying to create 20 or 30 question, from very easy to hard ones, to assess the knowledge of a new backup administrator.

Any help would be appreciated?

Thanks

[revarooo]

Some useful information here, though dated:

http://adsm.org/lists/html/Veritas-bu/2004-04/msg00042.html

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

1. What is User Backup,User Archive & How to take?
2. How do you configure a client for automatic backups?
3. What's the difference between diff incr and cumulative incr? 
4. How is a changed file determined on Unix?
5. When would I, or would I not, use cross mount points?
6. What is the difference between a Volume Group and a Volume Pool?
7. How do you back up the catalog? Why is this important? What do you have todo if you don't have a catalog backup?
8. How do you recover the catalog?
9. How do you configure retention levels for a backup?
10. What is multiplexing? What are multiple data streams? Are they the same?
11 .how can I recover an corrupted image?
12. How can we assign barcode rules?
13. What is OTM? TIR?
14. What format does NetBackup write the tape in?
15. How does NetBackup tie together with Media Manager?
16. How do I create a Storage Unit that will only be used by one client?
17. What is the difference between the expiration date for a volume in NetBackup's media catalog and Media Manager's volume database?
18. What is the difference between a frozen volume and a suspended volume?
19. How many Robot Control Hosts can a DLT tape library have?
20. What does the bpbkar process do?  bpbrm? bpdbm? ltid?  What is the AVRD process?
21. Why is the catalog the most important component of Netbackup?
22. what is AVR mode?
23. Why is a binary catalog more efficient than an ASCII catalog?
 

Set 2

1. If you have a SCSI attached robot and in device monitor you see the drives marked as AVR, what does that mean and how would you fix it?
2. If I asked you to tell me if a client has Netbackup on it just by using a telnet command what would you do?
3. If you wanted to know what IP address netbackup was using to perform backups what command would you run and where would you run it?
4. What is flash backup?
5. How is image stored in netbackup
6. If a media ID A04567 comes back and it is frozen, what are the steps to unfreeze it and move it back to scratch from the command line?
7. If you wanted to bypass netbackup commands and move a tape from slot 1 to drive 3 how would you do that?
8. What is the client version supported by NBU 6.x and 5.x masters
9. If your last catalog backup was two days ago and the master server crashed what would you have to do to bring your environment back up to present time?
10. How do you find a disk based image via the command line and then delete it?
11. How do you import an NBU image that has been written to a disk storage unit?
12. What are the critical catalogs or databases on a Media Server?
13. How would you tune NetBackup to increase backup performance?
In which location(path) the temp files located in Netbackup for Windows/Unix?
14.What is the process of importing images and why do we import images?
15.How to Importing and expiring images?
16.What does it mean by inventoring a robot?
17.What is SAN media server?
18. How to check tape is bad?
19. How to check the tape is already expired or not?
20. How to check volume pool?
21 Media has been already expired, How to find out?
22. How to check tape is in cap?
53. How to see log entries, how to create log directories?
24.SQL Script.. in client..how to create?
25. How to install media server(with device configuration steps)?
26.what is avr mode

27. There is a Tape library with 10 drives ...Can we able to create 2 Storage units.....?

28.There are 1000 Client machines , 999 machines are transferring datas in good speed but one client machine is taking too long to transfer a datas ..... That is ...backup should complete within 2 hours ..but after 12 hours and more ...the data transfer is still happening.... why?

These few might be slightly harder ...

Does NetBackup write to tape drives   (No, the operating system does)

You see a backup fail with status 24, where is the most likey cause  (Network issue outside of NBU)

What are ACS/ ASCQ errors (an error code returned by a scsi device)

Can NBU cause a TAPEALERT (No)

Name a command that accesss the media database (bpmedialist)

Name a command that accesses the volume database (vmquery)

How do you set up VX logs (shouldn't be hard but few people seem to be able to do it)

vxlogcfg -a -p 51216 -o <oid value> -s DebugLevel=<1 - 6> -s DiagnosticLevel=<1-6>

When using vxlogview, why should you always run the command with ' -d all'  option 

(Shows the Thread ID to allow tracing through the log

Martin

[ea021e]

Thanks for all the info.