Doubt About Backup Catalog

[admin_bkp007]

Hi everyone

I know about  for backup catalog netbackup will depends because some details there are in every environment.

Actually we have one job full for backup catalog running 11:00 a.m, but I think is not enough because we can lost 23hs about backup, so I think set one job full per week and every 3 hours backup incremental, but is there something like not recommendations about it ? Do they think one job per week is enough or better set jobs full three times per week?

Usually my backup windows are between 6 p.m and 5.am, is there no recommendations running backup catalog during this period?

My catalog netbackup has ~800GB size.

Thanks in advance.

[Michal_Mikulik1]

Hello,

several points:

- 23 hrs for 800GB backup is to much, consider if you send the backup to a right storage unit and via right network path

- if you have many longterm backups (months retentions and more), you can use "Compress Catalog After" in Host Properties to reduce its size

- there is no general best practise, you must just count with longer recovery in case of less frequent full backups. I personally use daily fulls wherever possible

- its better to run catalog backups after the backup window ending, then they cover all night data backups

Regards

Michal

[admin_bkp007]

Thanks for reply, maybe I didn't make myself clear, I refer 23hs without backup because I have just one job for my catalog backup, right? So if my netbackup crash we are losing data until point in time about last backup catalog.

So I didn't find this option "Compress Catalog After" in Host Properties ?

[StefanosM]

well..

you can run a full backup every day at 6 or 7 or 8 AM (it depends when the backups are finished) and a cumulative incremental every 3 h, if you have log backups during the day. If you do not have backups during the day there is no reason to run catalog during the day.
It is not recommend to run catalog backups during backup window. But you may try to run differential incremental catalog backups just to test if you have any impact at your backups.
If there is no significant impact, then its ok

[admin_bkp007]

Thanks about the opinions, I will set incremental backup then follow the job.

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

You don’t ‘lose’ the backups in the 23hr window you mention, they are just not in the catalog once it is recovered.

They can be imported from storage, which would recreate the entries in NBDB.

Of course, if you have more frequent backups, there is less to reimport.

On the subject of catalog backups …

Tape is the safest place for the catalog - tapes of looked after properly are massively reliable but given anything can fail, I’d have a duplicate just in case.

Basic disk is my next choice, it’s easy to recover from (providing you didn’t have disk failure/ corruption / malware that wiped out all your catalog backups (hence my comment that tape is the safest place).

Adv disk is the next choice, although if a system is rebuilt the mediaID of the adv disk often changes which is a bit of a pain as you have to ‘fix’ the DR file first.

Last choice is MSDP - it’s time consuming to get it all back up to be able to even start recovering the catalog when compared to the other storage I’ve mentioned above. For example, do you know the msdp username / passwd used when the system was set up, in my experience most people don’t, hence my comments about it being a pain to set back up.