Vault backup

[snawaz3]

NBU 7.1.0.4. 2008R2. my tape libray has 2 drives. In vault duplicarion I have set it up to use 2 drives. when I look at my vault jobs it seems to be backing up clients on both drives which I am assuming is backing up the client twice. This may be causing the backup to run twice as long. I thought if I select 2 drives it would write faster and backup different clients on each drive thus taking shaoter time. Can any one explain this to me. thanks

[Mark_Solutions]

Vault is for duplication only

If it is writing to both drives it is not running a backup it is duplicating the backups to both drives

However, if you only have 2 drives and you backup to tape then you can only use 1 read and 1 write drive during vault duplications

But please do not confuse vault with backing up clients

Hope this helps

[snawaz3]

Thanks Mark. Iam sorry. I used the wrong choice of words. I am using vault to write to tape. The process was taking long, so I selected 2 drives in the vault profile under the duplication tab. I assumed this would use both drives to write to tape. but I am seeing the same clients being written on both drives. I am thinking it is writing some clients twice.

[Mark_Solutions]

Need to see your vault profile (screen shots if you wish) and the logs from the vault profile (detail.log)

As long as you havent used multiple copies somewhere and only increased the number of drives then it shouldn't create 2 copies of anything

[snawaz3]

Attahed is the screen shots of my weekly profile

[RamNagalla]

Sanwaz,

please show us the duplication job file list

i hope this is not the repetative question for Duplication Thread

[snawaz3]

Hi Mark, It might well be. I have been having this problem where my weekly job which starts on friday 8pm keep running till tuesday / wednesday the following week. On monday, tuesday / wednesday the daily jobs also run which delays the completion of the weekly. I really need some help in this as this past week I have no backup job. I disabled the daily so that the weekly would finish but on wednesday the file server cluster failed over and the jobs were suspended as incomplete. When I came in on thursday I restarted the jobs but we had another fail over on thursday night and the jobs completed with errors. I have now killed all jobs and amd hoping to get a full back this weekend. I will let you know on monday how it goes.

[Mark_Solutions]

The vault profile looks OK to me

If your vault setup is not efficient enough and you are limited on dirives then perhaps Disk Staging would be better for you so that you keep on top of your duplications

It does mean you miss out on reports and ejects but it sounds like getting everything duplicated to tape would be more improtant for you at the moment

[snawaz3]

Reports and ejects are not as important as getting good differntial and full backups. What is Disk Staging, its advantages and how do I set it up. Thanks

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

From your profile it looks like you are using Basic Disk

To use disk staging you just need to open up the properties of the disk storage unit and select it to be a temporary staging area.

The difference will be that for a single disk storage unit you cannot use two different tape volume pools

You also need to set the retention of the backups to suit how long you want to keep the tapes as the disk and tape copy will have the same retention - but the disk will work on a capacity managed basis so will keep as much as possible on disk but clear it down as needed to prevent it filling up (as long as the oldest images have been duplicated)

If you have the licenses it is better to use Advanced (Enterprise) Disk which then allows you to use Storage Lifecycle Policies for your duplications which allows different retentions on disk and tape and different ta[pe volume pools

All in the manuals but worth looking at

[snawaz3]

Thanks Mark. I will look this up. Storage Lifecycle Policies seems like the better option as I need to have different retention periods for tape as the weekly and monthly tapes will go off site.

[Mark_Solutions]

Yes SLPs are best - but you do need to manage it carefully - use capacity managed for the disk retentions

You also need the Enterprise Disk licenses so you may need to buy more - or maybe go capacity managed which, if you dont have too high a front end data size, if a great option as it gives you all features apart from de-dupe