Catalog Tape Question 1

[gallows]

Is there anything special that needs to be done to start using a different new catalog tape or can I just remove the current one and replace it with a new one?

Also, what is recommended for the retention period for the catalog backups? I think mine was set to a week and I was thinking of changing it to a month.

Oh, we have Solaris, Netbackup 6.5.3.1.

Thanks for any input!!

 

[Skywalker1957]

Just put in a scratch tape and inventory your robot. Move the scratch tape once it's available in the inventory to the CatalogBackup volume pool. Sounds like you might want to launch the Netbackup Catalog Backup Wizard and configure an online hot backup. See the help files or the Admin guide for more information on configuring it. Once you're all set go to your catalog backup policy and kick off a backup. Hope this helped.

 

[bswip]

You should set aside a sequence of scratch tapes that belong to the Catalog Volume Group (i.e. T000001 to T000100). Then each Catalog tape would expire for the backup cycle it was used.

So if your daily backups expire in 7 days, the catalog tape for that particular backup would expire in 7 days.

If your weekly backups expire in 30 days, the catalog expires in 30 days, monthly in 365 days, catalog in 365 days, etc...

This will give you a pool of tapes to use for your offsite backups as well. I would also keep a small pool of tapes for your local catalog backup.

 

[gallows]

Thanks bswip! Good idea. Never really thought of it like that.

 

[bswip]

Glad to be of help.

One other benefit for setting aside a pool of catalog media is that during a DR (test or live) you will always know which media is the catalog....