cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

can i tell NBU to use a particular cartridge?

manatee
Level 6

NBU 7.6.0.4

i know that a policy can be configured to use a pool of tapes, for say, monthly backups but how do you tell NBU to use a  particular cartridge?

we have a new backup policy wherein i have to use 7 tapes for daily diff backups, 4 tapes for weekly full backups, and 12 tapes for monthly indefinite full backups. if i'm going to recycle the 7 daily tapes, how can i control that?

as far as i can tell, NBU works like a RAID-5 array where the data resides is strewn across the array. in short, one has no control where the data lands.

3 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS

Accepted Solutions

revarooo
Level 6
Employee

Netbackup was never designed for micro-managing. If you want to backup to specific tapes, you have to put them in a specifc pool.

Set the retention correctly and when the tapes are full and backups start to expire, the tape will be come ready for use again once the last backup image expires.

View solution in original post

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

Mirco management requirement.

Netbackup does it all for you - there is no need to sort backup into specific tapes. 

Rino19ny - two point that speak again backup to specific tape

  • Netbackup does not mix retensions - daily backup go to daily tapes, monthly to monthly. All out of the box behaviour
  • You can't restore data without the Netbackup catalog anyway. Thus knowing backup from yesterday if on tape xxxxxx does not help
  • Netbackup isn't built for this requirement - it's built for large scale operation. Its impossible to use this approach for Netbackup installation with 1000 clients (not even 200).

Just a frindly advice ...

 

 

View solution in original post

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified
You are setting yourself up for failure. You can create a separate pool for each schedule and add the specific tapes to the pools. The recycling will depend on retention level. Bear in mind that a Monday tape with retention level of 1 week will probably not have expired yet by the time the following Monday's backups start. This method of manually forcing backups to a specific tape was done ages ago before there were Enterprise Backup products like NetBackup. What is the purpose of this level of micro management? Do you need to keep specific client data separate? Do you need to bill a department for tape usage? If you decide to go this route, you are going to open a new discussion one of these days for status 96....

View solution in original post

9 REPLIES 9

revarooo
Level 6
Employee

Netbackup was never designed for micro-managing. If you want to backup to specific tapes, you have to put them in a specifc pool.

Set the retention correctly and when the tapes are full and backups start to expire, the tape will be come ready for use again once the last backup image expires.

sumitgree
Level 4

Create a seperate volume pools for daily,Weekly and monthly and move manually desired cartidges to pool which you want to use for backup.

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

Mirco management requirement.

Netbackup does it all for you - there is no need to sort backup into specific tapes. 

Rino19ny - two point that speak again backup to specific tape

  • Netbackup does not mix retensions - daily backup go to daily tapes, monthly to monthly. All out of the box behaviour
  • You can't restore data without the Netbackup catalog anyway. Thus knowing backup from yesterday if on tape xxxxxx does not help
  • Netbackup isn't built for this requirement - it's built for large scale operation. Its impossible to use this approach for Netbackup installation with 1000 clients (not even 200).

Just a frindly advice ...

 

 

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified
You are setting yourself up for failure. You can create a separate pool for each schedule and add the specific tapes to the pools. The recycling will depend on retention level. Bear in mind that a Monday tape with retention level of 1 week will probably not have expired yet by the time the following Monday's backups start. This method of manually forcing backups to a specific tape was done ages ago before there were Enterprise Backup products like NetBackup. What is the purpose of this level of micro management? Do you need to keep specific client data separate? Do you need to bill a department for tape usage? If you decide to go this route, you are going to open a new discussion one of these days for status 96....

mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Agree with Marianne (and others).

It becomes a nightmare to manage, NBU is not designed to be used that way, unlike say Backup Exec which I believe caters for Monday tape, Tuesday Tape and so on.

The idea for NBU, is you throw a load of tapes at it, and let NBU worry about what data is where.

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

"you throw a load of tapes at it, and let NBU worry about what data is where"

Possible the shortest and best description of how Netbackup tape handling work :D

Genericus
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP   

Additionally - default Netbackup behavior - even if you have available tapes in a pool, if a tape reaches the end, NetBackup will grab a tape from scratch FIRST before trying to use another empty tape already in your pool. 

I agree with others - review what is the problem you are trying to solve by doing this?

NetBackup 9.1.0.1 on Solaris 11, writing to Data Domain 9800 7.7.4.0
duplicating via SLP to LTO5 & LTO8 in SL8500 via ACSLS

Will_Restore
Level 6

"as far as i can tell, NBU works like a RAID-5 array where the data resides is strewn across the array. in short, one has no control where the data lands"

 

not exactly but a pretty good analogy  :)

 

Seth_Hollist
Level 3

You could disable/deconfigure all robotic library function and manually load the tapes yourself.

 

I haven't done that in about 16 years, and then my life was made simpler by implementing a robotic tape library and NetBackup.