Guidance on tiered storage

[TopHatSGI]

Hi all,

I could use some guidance around setting up different tiers of storage devices within NetBackup.  At present, our individual backup policies have various retention lengths associated with each of the schedules (for example, 'Daily' = 3 months, 'Weekly' = 6 months, 'Monthly' = 36 months).  These are written to the same BasicDisk Storage Unit, which is an NFS share from an on-prem Dell EMC Data Domain.

What I am trying to accomplish is have NetBackup move backups to a different storage device after a certain length of time elapses (say, when a backup is 6 months old).  The idea here is to move off these older backups to cloud-based storage in order to free up storage capacity on the on-prem Data Domain.

I'm still looking through the NetBackup guides, and I keep coming across Storage Lifecycle Policies.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around them, but from the testing I've done so far I can see how to create a duplicate copy job, but I'm struggling to understand how to expire/delete the original primary copy and designate the new copy as the primary?  Am I on the right track, or is there something else I should be looking at instead?

Currently running NetBackup version 9.1.0.1.

[Nicolai]

SLP is your friend and a very powerful tool. Learning how to master it should be your priority.

So you are on the right path.

What you are likely run into is the fact that SLP only work for new backups. You cannot put existing backups under SLP control. Backup images under SLP control will be expired and promoted according to the defined SLP. 

If you have existing backup to duplicate, bpduplicate and bpimage is the commands you have to work with.

A related tech note : https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100016222