volume pool cleanup

[brandonn]

Hello,

I'm undertaking the task of cleaning up volume pools. The previous admins thought it'd be fun to make different volume pools for everything and it's completely unneccesary. I wanted to hear from you guys any tips, do's, don'ts, when it comes to cleaning up volume pools.

Also, I have one question, am I in any danger trying to combine two volume pools? For example I have two volume pools

STATS_Fulls
STATS_Incs

The previous admin was sending full backups to 1 volume pool and the other to the other volume pool.... i cannot quantify with any amount of reasoning why this could be useful. Why not just have 1 volume pool?

[J_H_Is_gone]

I have 1 pool most of my backup use.
I take all tapes out every night.
If you do not allow different retentions on the same tape then even leaving your fulls (with a longer retention) in the library would not be use by the dailies (with a shorted retention) if you did.

My exceptions are
Catalog :  special barcodes (easy to spot and know it is a cat tape) has it own pool.
Long term tapes.  special barcodes here as well for tapes that need 7 year retention.

All others us the same pool.

[J_H_Is_gone]

If you allow different retetnion on the same tapes then you have the issue of

A tape gets
incr | full | incr | full | incr
 
now all the incr's expire you get
expired | full | expired |full | expired

so you could end up with a lot of tapes wating for longer retetion backups to expire before they become avail again to be used for backups, this could cause you to run out of tapes for the incr's

[brandonn]

Sorry, correction, we do NOT allow multiple retentions per media.

[brandonn]

Our tape library holds nearly 3,000 tapes. we never have to take tapes out and do not allow different retention per media.

(except for offsite vaulting of course)

[J_H_Is_gone]

if you do not allow mix, and you never take your tapes out then I see no reason to have one pool.

IMHO

[brandonn]

Any information on how I could combine two volume pools? Each have full/partially full media at the moment..

[J_H_Is_gone]

you cannot move any media that has valid images on it.

You will have to create your new pool.

You could then use the option to have all expired tapes automatically moved to the scratch pool.

Change your policies to use the new pool, if no tapes in it it would take from the scratch pool.

or

as tapes expire in the current pools, move them by hand to the scratch pool or the new pool.

[Andy_Welburn]

As Judy says, create the new pool & amend your policies to use same - then wait........eventually your old volume pools will be empty & can be "cleaned up".

The minimum number of volume pools will be easier to administer & use less tapes - let NetBackup manage the media for you!

[brandonn]

Thanks for the responses,

This is the route I took. I created the new storage pool that I want to use. Pointed all my policies to it, and froze all the other tapes in the other pools to wait for them to expire.