Duplication from VTL

[ianG]

Hi folks,

All our policies are all currently backing up to VTL, via 3 schedules

1. Daily schedule, incremental, 13 day retention
2. Weekly - full backup, 30 day retention
3. Monthly - full backup, 365 day retention - last weekend of every month

We have a requirement to duplicate off the images created by the monthly schedule only, to tape. These would be subsequently offsited. Images sucessfully duplicated can be then expired if necessary/desired. We're wondering what the best way to do this would be?

The way I figure it, we can do this a number of ways:
Manually - do a catalog search for images created the last weekend of the month, and manually dupe them off - time consuming, and as is manual, possiblity for error is high enough..
Vault - not much investigation into this, but first thoughts would be to create a vault profile for each backup policy, and use them to dupe images. Kicking them off manually at first, then perhaps looking into scheduling them in future. Possibly similar enough to the manual process, but good reduction in the possibilty of human error I reckon
Storage Lifecycle Policy - again, not much investigation into this, but certainly looks to be a winner. However, at first glance it would appear the SLP would be applied to all the schedules in the policy, where we'd only want the duplication applied to just the monthly schedule. Again though its early days for my investigation into this so any insight would be appreciated

Any thoughts? Anything Im missing, or any 'best-practices', whitepapers or manuals that you'd recommend?

Thanks,
Ian

[Rajesh_s1]

As per my knowledge,  best way is to go with Vault profile. Because it doesn't require any manual intervension .  You can select the clients and schedule the vaults and it will happen automatically .

[Nicolai]

I would pick SLP to do the duplication.

You can avoid SLP being applied to all schedules by setting the "Policy Storage" to e.g. "any" and then set  "override policy storage selection" to a SLP for the monthly schedule.

I can recommend the "Best practices for configuring NetBackup with Storage Lifecycle Policies"

or

Veritas NetBackup 6.5:Implementing Storage Lifecycle Policies

[ianG]

Thanks guys

Rajesh, thanks for your input :) I reckon initially, we'll be kicking things off manually just due to the sheer quantity of images needing to be duplicated, in order to try and manage the impact on our infrastructure. We'd be aiming then to automate everything, but that's probably long term goal

Nicolai, thanks for that! I had overlooked that option in the schedules, and that certainly opens up a whole lot of options for us - excellent!