Can I change jobs per policy for an active backup without restarting it?

[banjo67xxx]

Hi,

By a process of elimination I have deduced that there is a network issue which means that I can only get 7Mb/s from one of my NBU clients. Its been running an incremental backup for 30hrs now, and it might be nearly finished or it could have another 30hrs to run (I don't believe there is any way to know with an incremental backup, especially when I dont have a login account on the client). The problem is that my tape drives keep failing in my SL500 library, so I don't want this incremental backup to hog all the drives.

I have set jobs per policy to 1 for the policy which this client belongs to (it also has checkpoint every 50 minutes, and allow multiple streams) and I see that as each job ends it starts multiple new jobs so that there as many as there are working tape drives.

Is there any way to make the current active backup adhere to the new jobs per policy, without cancelling and restarting it?

Or is there another way I can achieve the effect that I can keep some tape drives free for other backups?

Thanks.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

You can try this command (I have seen it kicking in more jobs when increasing MPX for a STU):

bprdreq -rereadconfig
command is in /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd

This will not change jobs already active - only queued jobs and jobs still to kick in will be affected.

PS: 
To prevent drive shoe-shining and resulting drive failure, best to increase MPX in STU and schedules to increase drive performance.
This will allow multiple jobs from 1 client to write to 1 tape drive.
MPX value of 4 has been seen to give good backup performance and not have negative effect on restore jobs.

[banjo67xxx]

Thanks - the multiplexing seems to have allowed other backups to use the same drive where the policy referenced the same volume pool, so all jobs completed ok.

One of the badly performing backups finished after 52hrs, and another is still running after 3 days ...