Doubts about catalog

[Leoooooo]

Hello all,

I have some problems with my nbu 7.6 catalogs. It runs on a 2008 server. The catalogs are based on my dedicated E$ drive and I want to have a copy of this drive, that will be my dedicated F$ drive. I'm reading so many things about catalogs on tapes and I'm not sure that we are talking about the same thing as I've never not been asked about my catalog location, even less for a tape copy of it, anyway, we don't intend to tape backup the catalogs, the only thing I had to do was to change the catalogs location from my C$ to my E$ that was easy and is working fine.

So I just want to backup my catalogs from one drive to another, when I try to create a policy for this it fails with error 213, saying the Storage units are not available - which is odd as I have many scratch tapes available, I have drives available, and the bottom line is: I don't even want to use a drive nor a tape for this task, so what's going on here?

Thank you very much!

[revarooo]

You should backup your catalogs using a catalog backup method.

If you want to backup to disk, have you created a disk storage unit and pointed the policy at the storage unit?

We'd need to see the policy and storage unit config:

bppllist <policyname> -U

bpstulist <storageunit> -U

[Leoooooo]

Hi Revaroo,

Thank you for your response. The second command doesn't work with -U. So:

C:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bppllist Online_Catalog_Backup -U
------------------------------------------------------------

Policy Name:       Online_Catalog_Backup

  Policy Type:         NBU-Catalog
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      01/02/2015 12:20:21
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     0
  Max Jobs/Policy:     1
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           (specific storage unit not required)
  Volume Pool:         CatalogBackup
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       Gold
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no
  Application Discovery:      no
  Discovery Lifetime:      0 seconds
  ASC Application and attributes: (none defined)

  Granular Restore Info:  no
  Ignore Client Direct:  no
  Enable Metadata Indexing:  no
  Index server name:  NULL
  Use Accelerator:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  PC-x64        Windows2008   reedmgr005.####.co.##

  Include:  CATALOG_DRIVEN_BACKUP

  Schedule:     (none defined)
Catalog Disaster Recovery Configuration:
  Email Address:  
  Disk Path:       F:
  User Name:       (none specified)
  Pass Word:       (none specified)
  Critical policy: (none specified)

C:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bpstulist ?
bpstulist: unrecognized option ?
USAGE: bpstulist -label storage_unit_label[,storage_unit_label] [-L|-l|-U|-show_available|-lsa]
                        [-g|-go] [-verbose] [-M master_server[,master_server]
       bpstulist -group storage_unit_group [-verbose] [-M master_server[,master_server]]

C:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bpstulist
XXmgr005-hcart3-robot-tld-0-nas-YY-01 3 XXmgr005.XX.co.uk 8 0 20 4 0 "*NULL*" 0 1 1048576 nas-YY-01 0 1 0 0 0 0 *NULL* XXmgr005.XX.co.uk 0
XXmgr005-hcart3-robot-tld-0-nas-YY-02 3 XXmgr005.XX.co.uk 8 0 20 4 0 "*NULL*" 0 1 1048576 nas-YY-02 0 1 0 0 0 0 *NULL* XXmgr005.XX.co.uk 0

[Marianne]

 Residence:           (specific storage unit not required)

You have not selected any Storage Unit for Catalog Backup to go to.

You also forgot to add -U to bpstulist command and have just given us the 'unformatted' output.

The unformatted output show 2 robotic STU's:
XXmgr005-hcart3-robot-tld-0-nas-YY-01
XXmgr005-hcart3-robot-tld-0-nas-YY-02
and NO disk storage unit where you want to backup the catalog to.

So: you need to created a Basic DSU for the F-drive where you want to write the backup and then select this storage unit in the policy. 
(info in NetBackup Administrator's Guide, Volume I  )

The Disk path that you have specified in ' Disk Path:       F:'  is the place where you want to write the DR-file.
Info in Admin Guide I as well.

Path for Storage Unit as well as path for DR-path both need to be a folder - not just a drive letter.

[Marianne]

You can by all means change this value to 1. It means that no more than 1 simultaneous backup can run on this STU. Please run the catalog backup and let us know.

[Leoooooo]

Marianne, this is the second time I try to post an answer here.

It worked really fine, thank you very much. But both catalog and backup catalog drives looks very differente, the backup catalog is bigger and the catalog drive itself. Would it be any way to check if the backup catalog is reliable?

Thank you in advance.

[Marianne]

Are you using F-drive for catalog backups only? And for the DR-file?

The policy output above does nor show the retention level for your catalog backup or the frequency (how often).
What filenames and size for the files do you see on the F-drive?

If you do Catalog backups every day and you have Retention period of 1 week, then there will be 7 backups in total written to F-drive before the 1st backup will expire and be deleted from F-drive.

In short, all principals for 'normal' backups also applies to Catalog backups.

If you are short on space in the F-drive, best to configure the disk STU as DSSU (Disk Staging Storage Unit) where disk backups will be staged to tape according to the schedule that you specify in the staging config of the DSU.
When disk space gets low, the oldest backups that were successfully duplicated to tape will be expired and deleted.

The way to know if catalog backups are fine is to schedule regular DR tests.

You need to make entire F-drive available to a test (DR) server (with same name and not on same network as current master.

The DR-file and the actual backup files need to be present on the DR server to perform catalog restore.

You can read up about config of Storage Units (Basic, DSSU, etc) as well as config of Catalog backups in  NetBackup Administrator's Guide, Volume I . 

Detailed steps to recover NBU Catalog can be found in Disaster Recovery chapter of NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide  

[Marianne]

Thanks for the PM.

So, it seems that you have these files on the F-drive?

F:\ 
   Hot_Catalog_Backup_1421418200_FULL 

This file is what we call the 'DR-file'.
This file contains information about where and when catalog backup was taken and is needed before catalog can be rescovered.
(See references about  'Catalog Disaster Recovery File' in NBU Admin Guide I, Chapter 22)
You will see that Symantec recommends to have this file on a network share.
Also good practice to get DR-file sent as email attachment.
 

F:\Catalog_backup\
    .IMGs and .INFOs files

These are the actual backup files.

You will need the DR-file as well IMG and INFO files in order to perform Catalog recovery.

Please see Troubleshooting section of Troubleshooting Guide.
(Links to manuals in previous posts)

[Leoooooo]

That's amazing Marianne, thank you very much!

What I had in mind in only the first full and then an incremental catalog backup weekly to keep as infinity, just to update what has been backed up during the week. Could you just let me know if now my policy correct please?

C:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bppllist Hot_Catalog_Backup -U
------------------------------------------------------------

Policy Name:       Hot_Catalog_Backup

  Policy Type:         NBU-Catalog
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      01/14/2015 12:19:10
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     0
  Max Jobs/Policy:     1
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           Catalog_Backaup
  Volume Pool:         CatalogBackup
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       Gold
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no
  Application Discovery:      no
  Discovery Lifetime:      0 seconds
  ASC Application and attributes: (none defined)

  Granular Restore Info:  no
  Ignore Client Direct:  no
  Enable Metadata Indexing:  no
  Index server name:  NULL
  Use Accelerator:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  PC-x64        Windows2008   XXmgr005.XX.co.us

  Include:  CATALOG_DRIVEN_BACKUP

  Schedule:              Weekly_Incremental
    Type:                Cumulative Incremental Backup
    Frequency:           every 7 days
     Excluded Dates----------
        No specific exclude dates entered
        No exclude days of week entered
    PFI Recovery:        0
    Maximum MPX:         1
    Retention Level:     24 (infinity)
    Number Copies:       1
    Fail on Error:       0
    Residence:           (specific storage unit not required)
    Volume Pool:         (same as policy volume pool)
    Server Group:        (same as specified for policy)
    Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:         0
    Schedule indexing:   0
    Daily Windows:
          Monday     07:00:00  -->  Monday     08:00:00

Catalog Disaster Recovery Configuration:
  Email Address:   myemail@XX.co.us
  Disk Path:       F:\Catalog_Backup
  User Name:       (none specified)
  Pass Word:       (none specified)
  Critical policy: (none specified)

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

A new backup will not replace the previous backup - it will write a new backup each time a backup is done.

So, a new DR-file and new IMG and INFO files will be written for each backup.
I doubt that you have enough space on your F-drive to write a backup every week and keep that forever!

As I've said before - backups to DSU works the same way as tape.
Only when previous backups have expired can existing backups be overwritten.
Please read up on Disk Staging in Admin Guide I to stage catalog backups to tape.

You are also missing a FULL schedule in the policy.
A 'Cummulative Incr' will backup everything that has changed since the last Full backup in this policy.

A catalog backup once a week is not enough - if you are doing backups every day, you need to take a Catalog backup every day.

Infinity retention is way too much - what good will catalog backup be even within a month from now?

For DR, you need the latest Full and last Cummulative incremental along with DR-files.