Report: What kind of data and how much

[mjd42970]

We currently run Veritas Netbackup server 6.5.3 on Solaris, with oracle and winows client backups. We've had the software going on 4+ years, the one thing that kind of amazes me is that we still run out of available scratch tapes to complete backups. Sometimes it's quite a few tapes 20, to 40 tapes in a 4 to 5 month period. Then there are time when we have an abundant amount of scratch tapes to complete full backups.

My interest is to find out what is takeing up all the space. What data is being backed up, and where our assigned tapes are at.
We run daily (incremental), weekly (full) and monthly (full) backups.
Daily's are set to a 2 week retention,
Weekly are set to a 4 week retention
Monthly are set to a 12 month retention.

Can anybody help me with a report that would give me some sort of idea where all my storage is being consumed?

Thank you.
Mike.

[stu52]

OK, so you've told us about your retentions....that's good.  Now, please tell us how many different volume pools you have.  If you have several diverse volume pools that are also split up by retention, then that could be part of your problem.

If you have volume pools by policy type like Windows, Unix, Exchange, etc, etc, then there will be a set of each of these for each retention needed.  So, the more volume pools you have, the less likely you will be to fill up a given set of tapes. 

As an aside, I hope that you have also not changed the default of not allowing different retention levels on the same tape (Don't click that box that says "Allow multiple retentions per media").

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Run Media Written report on a daily basis. It will tell you which tapes were written by each media server, how much data and retention period. It unfortunately does not tell you what kind of data.
Also keep an eye on Media Logs report for media related problems.

[J_H_Is_gone]

this report will tell you for each media
the status - if it says Full then you went all the way to the end of that tape.
if it does not say full them there is still room on it.
it will show you kilobytes on each tape - with this you can see what tapes have little data on it and they try to figure out why so little data.
it will also tell you when was the last date it was written to - again giving you a hint of what tapes to look into.

if you do not allow mixed retention on a tape then a tape with 2 weeks retention should be used again by a schedule that has 2 weeks retention - so long as the tape is NOT frozen or suspended and it is still IN the library.

if you do allow mixed retention on a tape then a full tape that has a bunch of 2 week images and 1 4 week image on it - it will take 4 weeks before that tape can be used again.

if you use 1 volume pool then all your policies can use the tapes.
if you use different volume pools then you need to look at the policies that say it has no tape and find out what kind of tape it wants  (hcart hcart2 ... ) and verify that that kind of tape is avail in the pool it is trying to use and if you don't allow mixed retention do you have one avail with the same retention that it can use.