"No critical media available for policy {policy}"

[Adam_Webclients]

I've been getting these errors for about a week now every day at 1, 2, and 3AM.

"no  critical media available for policy {policy}"

I've checked to make sure that there are no empty volume pools assigned to the scheduled backups.  The policy writes to disk daily, writes to a tape weekly, and writes to a tape monthly.

I'm not sure what changes were made at the time this error started happening.

Any pointers?

Netbackup 7 .0

Thanks!

[Will_Restore]

The Disaster Recovery tab appears when you select the NBU-Catalog policy type on the Attributes tab. The Disaster Recovery tab contains options for configuring disaster recovery protection methods for the catalog data.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO34791#v42545709

Lists the policies that are considered crucial to the recovery of a site in the event of a disaster. The NetBackup Disaster Recovery report lists all of the media that is used for backups of critical policies, including the most recent full backup. The NetBackup Disaster Recovery wizard warns you if any media for critical policies are not available.

[Adam_Webclients]

Hi and thanks for the speedy response.

I checked the Disaster Recovery tab on my NBU-Catalog policy, and it does in fact list the policy in question as a critical policy, however, I do not have a "Disaster Recovery" report listed under my Netbackup Management/Reports directory (unless I'm looking in the wrong spot) so I can't tell if I have any missing media.

When I check the inventory on the robot, I know there are expired tapes in there that belong to the volume pool to which the schedule is assigned, so I'm pretty confused about the ordeal... >_<

[Will_Restore]

is sent as email attachment.  URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH63232

Ensure the expired tapes are not physically expired, frozen, or otherwise unusable by NetBackup.

[Adam_Webclients]

Hm, well it hasn't been sending me any emails concerning ciritcal media not being available.

Important detail I forgot to mention:  All my backups seem to be firing off and completing without any issues except for these errors every morning.

I'd speculate that it eventually does load the media, but it seems to choke three times before doing so.  Definitely pretty confused, but I guess I'll wait until next week and see if it gives me any issues.

Thanks

[Mark_Solutions]

From the docs:

Critical policies

Lists the policies that are considered crucial to the recovery of a site in the event of a disaster. The NetBackup Disaster Recovery report lists all of the media that is used for backups of critical policies, including the most recent full backup. The NetBackup Disaster Recovery wizard warns you if any media for critical policies are not available.

Note:
 The Disaster Recovery report lists the media for only incremental and full backup schedules so critical policies should use only incremental or full backup schedules. Certain database backups schedules, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, only use schedule types of Application Backup and Automatic Backup. Because of the schedule types, media listings for these backups do not appear on the Disaster Recovery report.

So my guess is that that policy either has not run, is an application backup that does not have a Full or Incremental backup schedule in it - so therefore there is no critical media to report on!

Easy answer is to remove it from the DR tab of the catalog policy - also make sure your DR file is e-mailed to you or your group (you need to put in the e-mail addres, install and configure blat and make a copy of the nbmail.cmd file and name it mail_dr_info.cmd in the netbackup bin directory and edit it to work for you)

Hope this helps 
 

[Adam_Webclients]

All backup types for the policy in question are "User Backup".  Another policy listed as critical has"User Backup" set for the backup types, but that policy (which is also listed as critical) does not complain.

I'm really going to have to dig further into this... although the advice given would probably solve the issue 99% of the time, it seems like I have something else going on..  Looks like the tapes are being loaded eventually (hence maybe the email not shooting out???)  Just seems really, really strange.. hah

Fri May 25 00:00:47 EDT 2012	no critical media available for policy dataiq	Error	0	General	backup1.local
Fri May 25 00:02:13 EDT 2012	no critical media available for policy dataiq	Error	0	General	backup1.local
Fri May 25 00:03:46 EDT 2012	no critical media available for policy dataiq	Error	0	General	backup1.local

05/25/2012 01:09:31 - begin writing
05/25/2012 01:20:16 - end writing; write time: 0:10:45
the requested operation was successfully completed  (0)

05/25/2012 03:08:29 - begin writing
05/25/2012 03:21:38 - end writing; write time: 0:13:09
the requested operation was successfully completed  (0)

05/25/2012 04:26:25 - begin writing
05/25/2012 05:27:57 - end writing; write time: 1:01:32
the requested operation was successfully completed  (0)

[Mark_Solutions]

Does the one that does not complain also have Full or Incremental backup schedules in it that run? If so then it would not complain as it runs normally.

If the other three do user backups all of the time but are listed as critical they will complain everytime as the media does not qualify due to being a user backup.

Take a look to see if the other policy ever actaully gets run as a user backup or just does scheduled backups

[Adam_Webclients]

Both policies contain nothing but "User Backup" schedule types.

Although, the policy that isn't complaining (despite having "User Backup" selected) has 6 jobs which all contain "full backup" in the name.  Our DBA set these policies up and they've been in place for years, unchanged.  It's only since 5/18 that it started spitting out errors.

I checked disk space for the daily backup, and the disk space is not the problem.  I also checked to make sure there were plenty of available tapes in the robot which are eligibile for writing, and are part of the volume pool that the "problem policy" is scheduled to write to.

The only things I've found so far that I can even begin to speculate at are:

There are 5 tapes in the volume pool that my "problem policy" is scheduled to pull tapes from, that we no longer have in our possession, but that probably isn't it because they aren't even being reported as being in the robot.

The disk that the daily scheduled backup writes to is a disk GROUP, and the first disk is 100% full, but netbackup has no problem failing over to the next disk in the group (it always has)

This is driving me insane!

(thank you guys for your help!)

[Marianne]

Do you REALLY need these critical policies in the Catalog policy? How long does a catalog backup run without critical policies? How long does a catalog restore take at DR with and without Critical Policies?

[Adam_Webclients]

Probably not.  I'd just rather fix the problem and not the symptom.

Either way its not a big deal... I'm sure I'll find a fix for it eventually.  WHEN I DO, I will post it here. :)

Thank you for all your help everyone!

[Marianne]

We have no customers listing Critical policies in the catalog policy.

They simply understand that entire catalog needs to be restored before normal restores can start.

As long as you have database policies listed in Critical list, there will be no solution. See Mark's post above.