catalog backup - multiple policies?

[stan56]

I'm trying to set up a hot catalog backup in NB 6.5. The goal is to have backups in 2 locations: tape (for off-site) and disk (for on-site and incrementals). I'd like to run a full backup to tape in the morning, then another full backup to disk in the afternoon, and then incremental backups to disk on some hourly schedule (have not decided on frequency yet).

I can't quite figure out how to set this up unless I have 2 policies. I tried to set up 1 policy with 2 schedules but I don't see how incremental would work in this case (I don't want it to based on the full backup on tape). So I'm thinking I would set it up like this:

Policy 1: tape (run full once a day)
Policy 2: disk (run full once a day + incrementals)

Will this work? I'm not sure about multiple schedules, there's a potential overlap issue (or is there? perhaps I'm over-thinking). Is there a better way to accomplish this? Has anyone tried what I'm trying to accomplish?

Also, how easy is it to recover from incremental catalog backups, if need be? I presume it's pretty much no different than from full, especially when all the images are on disk. Any experience with restoring catalog from incrementals?

Any suggestions are welcome!

[sdo]

Your policies look good.
Recovery from an incremental catalog backup is the same as from a full.
It's all about the DR file that I'm sure you already email to yourself.

Normally one catalog backup a day, after the session completion, is sufficient.

Is your environment huge, with backups running 24x7?

[stan56]

Yep, I have a large environment (7 media servers, 500 clients). So I'm pretty much running backups 24/7. I don't think I want to do an incremental after every session, I was thinking maybe every 6-12 hours? I'm more concerned with having independent policies for disk and tape catalog backups.

[sdo]

Independent policies for disk and tape sounds like the right thing to do. This way the full to tape won't intefere with the incrementals for the catalog backup to disk.  Just out of interest, how fast are your catalog backups?

[rjrumfelt]

I would recommend having 2 different full schedules that each use a different volume pool - say Cat1 and Cat2.  I would run one schedule M, W, and F, and the other T and Th.

[stan56]

My catalog is about 200GB. The backup to LTO1 library takes ~ 2.5 hrs. The disk backup varies, generally 1.5-2.5 hrs depending how busy the "disk" is. The disk target is actually a DataDomain storage mounted over NFS. It tends to get bogged down quite a bit when I'm running multiple backups to it. I have not tried incrementals yet - I've only upgraded from NB 5.1 about 2 weeks ago. I'm actually very curious how fast it will be and how much data it will backup as opposed to full.

I'll give the 2 policies a try, though I'm not sure what happens if the schedules happen to overlap. Since the backup time varies, I can't guarantee that they won't. I'm sure I can only do 1 catalog backup at a time. I presume the second backup attempt will be queued until the current backup is done?