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Exporting Catalog

shawntabat
Level 3

Hello,

I am new to NBU, taking over my company's environment with no experience since the previous admin left the company. My management has requested I send a third party our NBU catalog for management (ie., they have all of our tapes and catalog and when we request restores from them, they find the associated tapes and SFTP us the data). However, I have no clue what I am doing.

I've searched online and cannot find solid information, so I reached out to a user directly through here and he suggested I open my question up to you fine people. 

Our deployment is 7.7.3 and we're running a Linux master server, if this helps.

Thanks!

Shawn

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@shawntabat 

The 3rd-party company will need the catalog backup, the DR-file, plus the actual backup tapes.

Do a Catalog Backup to tape, then send the Catalog backup tape along with DR-file.
They then need to perform a Catalog recovery using the catalog backup tape and DR-file.

Note as per @DPFreelance 's post that the master server hostname must be the same.
NBU installation must also be done to the path and version must match exactly.

NBU Catalog Recovery is covered in the Disaster Recovery chapter of NBU Troubleshooting Guide. 

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DPFreelance
Level 4

So what would need to happen is:

The other company would need to stand up a new master server with the SAME hostname as your current master.  Then the can "import" the catalog into that server.

There are a variety of ways you could do that, depending on how big your catalog is and what you write it to.  If you write it to tape, you can send them the tapes plus the "Catalog DR File" (which should be written out or emailed to you every time a catalog runs).  If you write your catalog to disk (it would have to be 'standard disk'), you coud copy the files mentioned in the Catalog DR File and send them all of that on whatever medium you choose.

 

Question: what are you going to do about future backups?  You would have to continually sync the catalog to the 3rd party if you want access to backups written since the last catalog you sent them.

Hello DPSafelite,

We are migrating to another appliance and for contract reasons we need to have this tape library around, but not actively receiving backups.

If I go into Policies and open up my Catalog backup policy, then go to Disaster Recovery tab, it should write a copy of the backup to the path designated. From there, I can send it over to our vendor. Is that right?

-Shawn

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@shawntabat 

The 3rd-party company will need the catalog backup, the DR-file, plus the actual backup tapes.

Do a Catalog Backup to tape, then send the Catalog backup tape along with DR-file.
They then need to perform a Catalog recovery using the catalog backup tape and DR-file.

Note as per @DPFreelance 's post that the master server hostname must be the same.
NBU installation must also be done to the path and version must match exactly.

NBU Catalog Recovery is covered in the Disaster Recovery chapter of NBU Troubleshooting Guide. 

andrew_mcc1
Level 6
   VIP   

There are a few other things that could arise in my experience;

i) the 3rd party needs to have a license key for their NetBackup installation, you may want to clarify if they have their own or are planning to use your company's license key. This could have licensing implications as I believe they are non-transferable

ii) the catalog will delete expired backup entries over time so the 3rd party may end up with significant numbers of unassigned and uncataloged tapes that still contain readable backups; you may want to agree a procedure to deal with these to be compatible with GDPR etc. This also happens with in-house deployments but you may have fewer options when everything is hosted by a 3rd party

iii) if your catalog backups are to MSDP, you will probably need to duplicate them to a BasicDisk storage unit or tape so you can send them to the 3rd party. If you are completely new to NetBackup it may be a good idea to get the 3rd party to do this or provide detailed instructions for your envirnoment

iv) NetBackup 7.7.3 is out of Veritas support, you may want the 3rd party to update to a supported version and if this is a long-term arrangement, to do further upgrades subsequently to maintain future support

Good luck, Andrew

 

Thank you all for your help!

From what I've gathered, they will need the DR file that's backed up to my NAS, the tape the catalog is backed up to, the name of the master server, and the actual tapes. This is the simplest form.

I will check on licensing, but I'm pretty sure they have that portion covered.

For tape expiration--it's still our responsibility, so I have the catalog and will manually send them tapes to expire.

 

 

andrew_mcc1
Level 6
   VIP   

Plus the source system's NBU Installation path as Marianne mentioned earlier (it is possible for the 3rd party to work this out from an actual catalog backup by importing it on another NBU instance but that could be a lot of extra work).

Andrew