Tape Rotation - Advice Needed

[markdavies1978]

Hi All,

I'm in the process of defining a tape rotation policy, this is my 1st attempt.

I will be putting together a Daily, Weekly & Montly tape rotation policy.

Daily - 1 Week Retention (Requires 2 tapes per day 10 tapes in total)

Weekly - 1 Month Retention (Requires 5 tapes per week 25 tapes in total)

Monthly - 1 Year Retention (Requires 5 tapes per week 25 tapes in total)

The above means I will require a total of 60 tapes per year.

My plan is to (under each backup policy) is to create a "Daily", "Weekly" & "Monthly" schedule which is defined to use the appropriate Volume Pool, e.g. a Daily backup would use tapes from the "Daily" backup pool.

Does this sound like a good starting point?

What's the best way to add media to the relevent Volume Pools, to simply add all the media to my tape library & move them appropriatley?

Many thanks for any advice, I'm fairly new to all of this.

[Andy_Welburn]

as NB will keep the data separate (by default) due to the different retention periods.

Having said that, that's similar to how ours is set up!! Easy enough to control, just don't let them get out of hand! e.g. no Monday, Tuesday, January, February volume pools etc.

As far as adding the media - just put them all into your correctly configured scratch pool & let NB pick them from there when it needs to (they should also return to scratch once expired)

[markdavies1978]

Thanks Andy.

I don't currently have a "scratch pool" I guess I need to manually create this?

I will then need to add the media to my library then add to the scratch pool?

[Andy_Welburn]

but I would.

If you don't have a scratch pool, then you must ensure that all your volumes have available tapes otherwise you'll end up with failures (EC96's). At least if you have a properly configured scratch pool you only have to ensure that volume pool has available media in it.

[markdavies1978]

Ok so from what you are saying if I configure all policies to use a scratch pool I won't necessarily require the volume pools that I mention above? As the backup policy will simply pull tapes from the scratch pool meaning an additional overhead? Or would you say you find it usefull having multiple pools?

How does the scratch pool difer from the Netbackup pool?

Thanks.

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

No.

You cannot configure policies to use scratch pool. Configure them to use the volume pool you suggested, then, when the backups start and there are no volumes in those pools, NB will pull any available media that it requires from the scratch pool.

***EDIT***

If you do use a scratch pool, just ensure that it is configured as a scratch pool (tick the box that says scratch pool!) not just it's name.

***EDIT #2***

About scratch volume pools
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO49122

[markdavies1978]

Thanks Andy, this has helped.