Netbackup Retentions/Vaulting

[smaslin]

I think I am over-thinking my problem, so lets see if anyone has any ideas for this one....

I am currently backing up some servers to tape, some to disk first (using the temporary staging area option to send to tape later).

All full backups have a 1 month retention assigned to them.  We have instituted a backup strategy that includes keeping weekly fulls off site for 1 month, end-of-month fulls off site for 1 year, and end-of-year fulls offsite for 7 years.  Since instituting this policy, we have manually changed the Iron Mountain stored tapes with the different delivery time.  Obviously we also lose the ability to search these archives because they are expired out of the Netbackup database.

My desired result is to have Netbackup set the appropriate retention period, and also be able to search the backups that are off-site past 1 month.

We are running 7.5.0.4, with one master and two media servers, one handling differentials, one handling fulls.  Each media server has one 110-tape library with 4 LTO4 drives each.  We are licensed for netbackup vault as well, and currently only use that to eject tapes on Monday mornings for our weekly pickup.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Steve

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

I have never had a customer that uses different servers for different backup types - very interesting as it means one server sits doing nothing while the other one does all of the full backups - this maybe needs looking at?

The key to you tape management is whether you need to use different tape volume pools for each backup retention.

If you do then disk staging is not a great help as you need a different disk staging storage unit for each volume pool of tapes.

For this type of case Enterprise (or Advanced as it is sometime called) Disk is the answer.

You can then use Storage Lifecycle Policies to do the work for you.

This allows you to have a Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annual Storage Lifecycle Policy, each of which has a retention set for the disk copy (usually according to how much disk space you have) and then an alternate retention set for the tape copies (your 1 month, 1 year, 7 years etc.)

This works well

As you also have Vault licensed you can use this - just have daily, weekly, monthly and annual vault profiles that specify which backups and schedules to select for duplication and the retention and volume pools used for them

The only issue here is that it does not protect you disk copy - so say you keep data on disk for a week but on tape for a month... with Disk Staging and SLPs then the data will not expire from disk after a week if it has not been duplicated - with vault this is not the case so if you tape library was down for a week you could loose the duplicate copies

Hope this gives some ideas

[smaslin]

So what if I do this (which is what I was thinking to begin with):

Policy backs up ServerA to disk as a 1 month retention as a full backup on a weekly basis.

Vault session called Monthly Backups sends that backup to tape with a 1 year retention, this runs once per month on the last weekend of the month.

That being said, the disk version of the backup should expire in 1 month, but the tape one will not, and I should still be able to see the data in the database (Backup/Archive/Restore system).

Do I have this correct?

By the way, the other library handles differentials while the other handles the weekly fulls.  I have it that way right now because if I allow media servers to do fulls on both, then when I eject my tapes I will have a bunch more tapes than I can send out on a weekly basis. Unless you have a better idea?

Thanks for the help!