Catalog Tapes

[riddock55]

Hi,

I am new to Netbackup and have a simple question regarding the catalog tapes..

Are these specific to a particualr backup, ie in a disataer recovery situation, do I need to use Fridays catalog backup with Fridays full backup, or for instance, as it was a public holiday, Fridays catalog was overwritten by the catalog created during Mondays cumulative backup.

Would Mondays Catalog be ok to use with Fridays backup?

Thanks

 

[Martin999]

For DR you would pref. use the last catalogue created. I would recommend not overwriting Fridays on Monday etc... you really want to keep a coupe of weeks, in case you need to go back for some reason.

Martin

 

[OHWS]

You should keep multiple copies of the catalog as the previous poster stated. In your example it appears that the cumulative overwrote the Friday full. If this is the case then the backup would be of little use since the cumulative backs up everything since the last full backup and it was overwritten. If that's the case then you would only be able to recover images from after the Full backup until the Cumulative backup. Everything prior you would have to perform tape imports to recover the data (takes a long time to perform, 2 step process for each tape.)

Also keep in mind that bad/broken media does happen and usually happens at the worst time possible i.e.(Murphy's Law). There should be multiple full copies of the catalog and the incrementals to roll forward should also be kept.

 

[RustyMajor]

If this is 6.x version, your catalog backups are not overwritten, only appended to the tape(s) being used by the catalog backups, just like a normal backup job. I assume this is the case because you cannot do cumulative catalog backups in any prior version of NBU.

Obviously, anytime you restore your catalog, you lose the tracking information within the catalog for all backups made between the time of the catalog you just restored and the present. You can import all of this data, however you need to know what tapes they were put on, and that's the tough part.