Daily Tape changes

[danielharrigan]

I have been asked to organize the backups for our unit to match other offices. In order to to this we have to start changing tapes manually. I can figure out how to desiginate tapes to only be written to on certain days by assigning them to policies that run on only on certain days. But my biggest issue is that I need to change the catalog tape everyday but I need to be able to have the catalog tape stop being written to @ midnight and the other tape in the robot be activated. I have read through the documentation, and the only way I can see to do this is to write a script for each tape to suspend it @ midnight. Is there any other solution to this? We are running Netbackup 7.0.1 on a Windows 2003 R2 server.

[mph999]

Not really, NBU isn't designed to work like this (unlike I believe Backup Exec).

About the only way I can think of, is to have multiple volume pools containing the tapes for the day.

Mon_tape

Tue_tape  etc

and 

MonCat_tape

TueCat_tape etc ...

Create separate policies for each day, controlled by the schedule and write to the volume pool for that day.

Regards,

One catch (possibly) is that you canot move tapes into different volume pools if they are assigned (that is, contain valid images).

Martin (Symantec Senior TSE UK)

[mph999]

Or, as an alternative, create separate schedules within the same policy to run the different days, and within the schedule, over-ride the volume pool, so mon schedule uses mon vol pool etc ...

M

[danielharrigan]

I can get backups to write to different tapes based on a day by creating volume pools and policies that is simple enough. The biggest problem is to get the catalog to do the same. We have a linux server do it so why cant a windows server do it. In fact the linux server sends us e-mails letting us know what tapes to change every day.

Catalog

Server
         backup

Date
         Thu Jul 28 08:00:03 2011

Policy
         calalog.backup

Catalog Backup Status
         the requested operation was successfully completed (status 0).

To ensure that the NetBackup catalog data is protected through
Thu Jul 28 08:00:03 2011, retain a copy of the attached file, and the media
 or files listed below:

Catalog Recovery Media
        Media Server     Media ID
      * backup           HGJ610

Backup Tape

Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 -----------------------------
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 CLIENT: backup
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 POLICY: __DSSU_POLICY_Disk_Staging_Area
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 SCHEDULE: Disk_Staging_Area
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 SCHEDULE TYPE: FULL
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 STATUS: 0
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 STREAM: -1
Thu Jul 28 09:45:21 EDT 2011 -----------------------------
Media ID's = 000027
Suspending Media ID = 000027

There must be a way!

[mph999]

The catalog will behave the same way as the data backups if you use diff policies/ or schedules.

The catalog backup is nothing special, it is simply, just another backup.

Martin

[J_H_Is_gone]

do tonight's backups  and some time in the morning do a catalog

when the work day starts

eject all tapes that were written to last night ( you want your catalog to be as current as you can - like running it when all or most backups are finished)

you can run a tapes written to report or sort the GUI by time assigned