Cloning Operations 1

[Voyager1]

This is one of those "is there any way to..." items.

Networker 5.5.x (couple of versions) on NT 4 into StorageTek Timberwolf with 4 DLT drives.

We create clone copies of all our "full" savesets from the past week every weekend. These are then removed for offsite storage. We kick this off from a batch file using NSRCLONE. No matter how much data is being cloned, the system will span it over 2 or 3 tapes, meaning I have to remove 2 or 3 half-full tapes each week.

I want to reduce the number of tapes used by the cloning operation. Ideally, I'd like the system to fill one tape before going to another. Unfortunately the 'parallelism' setting is pretty much global in nature, so I don't want to do that.

Any ideas?

TIA - Bill

"You can get anything you want out of life, if you'll just help enough other people get what they want" - Zig Ziglar

 

[cfowler]

Hi there,

You could setup the Default Clone or whatever your clone pool is called, to use only one tape for the purpose of cloning.

Good luck,

cfowler

 

[Voyager1]

Yeah, my only question on that is what if I need more than 1 tape to complete the clone? The amount of data here is very dynamic, so I never know ahead of time.

The clone jobs run over the weekend, so no one is around.

The quest continues... - Bill

"You can get anything you want out of life, if you'll just help enough other people get what they want" - Zig Ziglar

 

[ShawnL]

in the setup of your clone pool, limit it to just one device. Then the clone operation will only use that one device. This should achieve what you want, although I don't know how effecient it will be.

 

[Voyager1]

Tried that, too. I thought that would be a good fix, and would cut way down on the tapes. Here's what happened:

First, if there was a tape already mounted in the device that was specified for the Clone pool, a Clone tape would never mount. Okay, so we'll issue an nsrjb -u to unload the drives before the clone operation starts. Cool.

But, when a clone operation is about to commence, Legato mounts the source tapes before mounting the target tape. 99 times out of 100 it mounts a source tape in the clone drive. Same problem as before.

Still don't know what the fix is beyond dedicating one of the 4 drive to cloning operations only, and specifying the other 3 as "normal". I've got to see how that would impact regular backup throughput...

Thanks for the suggestions... - Bill

"You can get anything you want out of life, if you'll just help enough other people get what they want" - Zig Ziglar