Granting Resources (Tapes)

[OPsTech]

We have an issue where a parent job grants a resource (tape), but then never writes to that tape; all child jobs write to other tapes. The problem is these particular backups are sent offsite for storage and we log these tape numbers to pull them from the library. What happens is since the tape is not written to by the offsite backup, the tape is then used for onsite backups. But the tape number has already been logged and will be pulled once the offsite runs have completed. This creates a problem when we need to do a restore from an onsite job that has been sent offsite. We have a particular run of 6 backups or so that kick off early in the morning, using the same tape(s). Each parent job spawns about 8 child jobs. All the child jobs will use the same tape(s). Sometimes the parent job will not grant a different tape number and use the same tape(s) as the child jobs. But this is very rare. These jobs are set to use the offsite pool. All servers involved are Windows 2003 servers (master, media & clients.) I don't remember this being an issue in NetBackup v5. We are now using NetBackup v6 w/MP6. Has anyone ran across this issue before? Can this be prevented from happening?

[Omar_Villa]

You can split your tapes and jobs with different Volume Pools and with Vault you will only eject the tapes under your Offsite pool, also if you have a vault licence you can always duplicate your daily jobs to a different pool or set of tapes, this way you can reuse your tapes and apply an small RTO or RPO and only your offsite images will be the ones with long expiration dates.

regards

[OPsTech]

Thanks Omar. The jobs are in different pools. When the parent job starts it "grants" a tape from the scratch pool, but never actually moves it to the offsite pool since it was never written to. Again, we log the tape numbers for our offsite jobs as they are granted, so we don't actually know that it was not written to unless someone happens to notice that an onsite job uses that tape. This happens with our various onsite pools also, but that is not an issue for us really. We do not have a Vault license.