need help with the duplicating tape images please.

[rclegarto]

Hi there,

I need your help team. I am trying to duplicate 1 tape into a new tape. However, my situation is, we only have 1 tape drive available for use.

My plan was to duplicate the image on the local disk space (since no disk storage is connected to the media server), but then the available disk space could not accomodate all the images on the tape so I was planning to do it in a batch of 10 images.

I have started the duplication using GUI to duplicate images on tape to the disk.Then when I was trying to do the same from disk to new tape, I am being prompted with

"inf - skipping backup id ******* , it already has 2 copies"
"inf - no images or media matching the selected criteria"


my question is/are

1. Is this approach possible?
2. what does it mean when it says "skipping backup id ..."?
3. If this is possible, can you give me tips how do I do it?

appreciate your help on this. :)

[FrSchind · Accepted solution]

This will work, you have to change one setting. In the GUI go to the Host Properties of your master server. Under Global Attributes you can set the number of maximum backup copies - increase this to at least 3.

Now you can continue and the message will not appear.

[rclegarto]

Will this not mess things up afterwards?

Also, is there any important thing i need to do first in order to duplicate images on the disk to the new tape?

I'm really running out of options here :( so all your suggestion will be of great value to me.

[FrSchind]

Nothing will be messed up. This is what happens whith these copy-numbers:

you create a backup to tape - copy 1
you duplicate the backup from tape to disk - copy 2
----- with the default setting you cannot go on from here ----
you duplicate the backup from disk to tape - copy 3

Additionally to the copy number, for one copy of each image the option "Primary Copy" is set. This defines, which copy should be used for a restore. This can be set when duplicating or in the image catalog when browsing the copies (per right-click).

[rclegarto]

Cool. Thanks. Let me try this.

By the way, is there any way to reset the count to 1 again? Because I already have deleted the duplicated imges on disk due to disk space issue. I was wondering if there's a way to reset the counter so I could start all over again. hehe


=======================================================
Nothing will be messed up. This is what happens whith these copy-numbers:

you create a backup to tape - copy 1
you duplicate the backup from tape to disk - copy 2
----- with the default setting you cannot go on from here ----
you duplicate the backup from disk to tape - copy 3

Additionally to the copy number, for one copy of each image the option "Primary Copy" is set. This defines, which copy should be used for a restore. This can be set when duplicating or in the image catalog when browsing the copies (per right-click).

[CY]

Hi rclegarto,

To "reset" the back copies to only 1 copy, you need to expire the extra copy /backup images (either through the Catalog GUI, or use bpexpdate commnad).  Don't manually delete backup iamges on the disk storage unit, because NetBackup does not know that action and would believe that backup copy still exists.

Once you expire a backup iamge in NBU Catalog, NBU automatically deletes/cleans up the backup image on the disk storage unit.

Now a days a lot of copmany implement B2D2T (backup to disk first, then duplicate to tape), so it's normal to see backup image on disk with short retention (1 day to couple days), and the duplicated image on tape with longer retention (weeks to months).

BTW, before you expire a backup copy, make sure you really selete the one you want to expire, not the one you want to keep (such as the one on tape).

[rclegarto]

To everyone who share brilliant suggestions on this one. Thanks so much! :)