Moving from LTO2 to LTO4 ( or 5 ) - anyone have a script?

[David_McMullin]

I have many thousands of LTO2 tapes - we are considering moving to LTO4 or LTO5...

For business reasons we have many long retention tapes - and due to changes in policies, some have been brought back from storage and had images added, so the tapes can have wildly different image dates. This means using the GUI to select images to duplicate can be ardous.

My understanding is that NetBackup is based on images not tapes, i.e. - it is not so easy to simply say "copy tape 1 to tape 2" - you have to list the images on tape 1 then bpduplicate the images to tape 2.

I am looking into moving my images from LTO2 to disk, then from disk to LTO4 tapes, since the tape sizes are different, it will not be a one to one match.

Does anyone have a unix shell script already created that determines the images on a tape, and duplicates them, verifies the duplication and then expires the original?

Or - is there an easier way?

Thanks in advance!

NBU 6.5.4 on Solaris 10
writing to EMC 4206 VTL
duplicating to LTO2 in SL8500
ACSLS 7.3.0

[Nicolai]

But I would like to comment anyway :)

Copying images from LTO2 to a disk staging area is a good idea since  tape to tape copy can be very slow.

Some things to note:

• to promote the LTO4 or 5 copy as the new primary copy.
• to expire the disk version after the image has been transfered to LTO4/5
• Remember a backup image can have multiple copy's - but the copy number never changes. The disk copy will always be copy 2 even if the primary image has been deleted (the LTO4/5 version will be copy 3).

[Anton_Panyushki]

Actually there is another way to migrate images that reside on LTO2 tapes to LTO4 tapes:

1. Get a list of images you want to migrate.  Use bpimagelist.

2. Next, for each image get the media IDs of the LTO2 tapes that correspond to an image. You can do it by parsing bpimagelist output.

3. Now you should determine the physical location of every tape you found on step 2. Some tapes might be offsite, you should bring them back. vmquery output will give you a clue.

4. This is where we have to cheat a bit. Accordin to LTO standard LTO2 tapes are readable by LTO4 drives. The only thing we have to do is to masquerade LTO2 tapes as LTO4 ones for NetBackup. We use vmchange for that: vmchange -new_mt <lto4_Mt> -m <mediaID>. Usually new media type is hcart. After that, run vmquery -m <mediaID> or bpmedialist -m <mediaID> to make sure that media type is changed.

5. Finally, export the media you want to duplicate right into LTO4 library and get to duplication.