Restoring from Stand-Alone Drive

[swhall72]

Long story short, our robotic tape library is going away and we'll only have access to a single stand-alone drive (one tape at a time), no label reader, just a standard drive. Since I'll have tapes that will still have valid images for 30 days beyond when the robot is out of service, can I use the single tape drive to do restores? Up to this point the singe drive hasn't been used with NBU. I'm using NBU 7.5 server on Solaris 10.

Any help / advice / links to tech docs is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Sean

[Marianne]

Yes.

Many users are using standalone tape drives at their DR sites.
The tape drive can still read the internal tape label (header) that should correspond with external label.

When the robot and tape drives are deleted, media will automatically be changed to Standalone (non-robotic).

Use the Device Config wizard to add Standalone tape drive.

Just ensure that the drive density is the same as original tape drive(s) in the robot and that it matches the media density.

When you want to do a restore, you will be prompted to load the media-id in the drive.

PS:
Will there be a need to run duplications or backups to the Standalone tape drive?

[swhall72 · Accepted solution]

Marianne,

First, thanks for the quick response. We're moving to all disk/SAN storage so we'll only need the standalone if we have to recover anything from what was already written to tape on the robot. After the 30 days is up we'll clear of all tape backups.

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

One other thing that can be an issue with standalone tapes .. when you do the restore it puts a mount request into device monitor .. you can just grab it and drop it onto the tape drive in device monitor to satify the request and get things progressing

Doesn't always need it but worth watching out for if a restore just seems to be sitting there doing nothing

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

Let the robot stay the additional 30 days and avoid the standalone tape drives issues

Does it matter if the robot is out of service ?

It will be idle anyway.

[swhall72]

Nicolai,

Actually this is the plan, almost. We're going to leave the robot in place in case we need it, I'm trying to work up a back up plan because we've had lots of problems with the robot in the past. The chasis has been replace by Oracle field engineers twice in the last year. For what it's worth, your right, it really doesn't matter if it's not supported I just don't want it to be my only option.

Mark,

Thanks, that's good to know. I imagined it wouldn't be a problem but a few times in the past I've thought to myself, "I'm sure that can be done." only to be wrong. I appreciate the confirmation.

[Nicolai]

Have you tried to use one of the tape drives manual while mounted in the robot. If you uncheck the "is in robot" under device configuration Netbackup think is a standalone drive and you in-theory should be able to mount tapes by hand (robot door opened). 

That trick work on the Oracle SL700 and SL8500 robots.