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Archiving and Stubs

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markey164

Technical User
Apr 22, 2008
26
GB
Is anyone else using the Commvault File Archiver to Archive data to Tape?

I am currently in the process of testing and implementing File Archiving for both long term data (7 years) and data with an infinite retention period and experimenting with the associated stub technology although this is all quite new to me.I have a few questions.

1) If I point my archive subclient towards a top level File Store location (i'm currently testing with a photography filestore), i notice that for some reason, it doesn't archive absolutely everything underneath it. I've noticed a few folders containing Nikon NEF files aren't being archived whereas other same level folders containing NEF files ARE being archived. I only have the default filters set, and the subclient is currently set to archive anything over 2k, and to archive when the drive gets to less than 100%. Any thoughts as to why this might be?

2) Should i, or should i not keep the stub files? We are implementing a policy where everything being put to the archive location is being documented, so we will know the paths to specific files etc if recovery is needed. We anticipate we will end up with millions of stub files which we are guessing will become an increasing overhead, and are thinking about not creating stubs to remove this issue. Any comments/thoughts/drawbacks on doing this?

3) Ok so I run my archive policy, and move a set of test data to tape, I then browse the latest data for that client a few days later, and i see a small subset of the entire data set. Ok now I'm confused. The archive policy runs daily, but the data set has not changed since the day it was archived, so I would expect to see the full data set, or no data, not sure which or what Commvault *actually* shows you when you look at the latest data? I do see the full data set when i browse data on day after i archived it off? Can someone explain what is happening here? I'm looking at not using stubs (as per point 2) above), surely i dont need to know what date I archived the data in order to find it and recover it?

4) If i want to implement 2 or more different retention periods for different sets of data, should i do this with separate storage policies?

Any help with the above points and any general caveats/pitfalls on your experiences with archiving and stubbing greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks in advance
 
Do not under any circumstances archive to tape, unless you plan not to have users acessing the archive. Retrieval from tape works of course, but it's simply too slow, if you have the usual amount of users accessing the archive concurrently.

The stub file consumes 4K (or more, depending on the OS blocksize). This means that there is no point in replacing a 2k file with a 4k stub. With Galaxy 6.1 at a ceratain patchlevel it was even impossible to do this.

Stubs serve one purpose: They take the place of the original file. If you want to open a file from the archive, you just open the stub and the archive will start a persistent recovery and overwrite the stub with the original file. If you do not create stubs, you will have to manually restore data from the archive over the commvault GUI.

Sure. For different retention times you need different storagepolicies.

 
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