Duplicate images

[DesperatelySeeking]

Hi all (again)

Monthly backup ran over the weekend. One of the policies was set incorrectly and wrote the image to a tape in the wrong pool. So now I have an image with a retention of six months on a tape in a pool where the retention dates are usually 13 days. I know I can't move the tape from one pool to another without deassigning it. I also know that deassigning a tape without expiring the image on that tape also causes problems. So, after reading around, I've decided that the best solution would be to duplicate the image onto a tape in the correct pool and make this tape the primary image. I can then expire the original image and reuse it in its intended pool.

I have tried duplicating but whenever I do the job seems to want to mount both the source and target tapes simultaneously. Do I need two tape drives to make a duplicate? If not what am I doing wrong?

TIA

DS

 

[Stumpr]

Check your settings on the media server to see if you have inadvertantly enabled "allow multiple retentions per media". The default is to NOT allow multiple retentions. The only image on the tape should be the 6 month image if you do not allow multiple retentions on a media. Unless tapes are desparately needed I would just wait for the tape to naturally expire. If I needed to have the data, I would simply do a second backup with the correct pool in the policy.

If you want to make a duplicate then you will need a drive "pair." One to read the original data on the source and one to copy the image unto. If you do not have 2 tape drives available then you can investigate using an "alternate read host".

Bob Stump
Just because the VERITAS documentation states a certain thing does not make it a fact and that is truth.

 

[DesperatelySeeking]

Stumpr - unfortunately tapes are deperately needed here!

I don't have the option to pair up drives but we do appear to have bodged a solution. We thought of creating a disk based storage unit and duplicating to that, then duplicating back to a tape in the correct pool. This sounded fine until we realised that we don't have enough free disk space for the image on the media server. Then we found a 1TB USB drive so we connected it up and found less than 50 GB free (still not enough). SO we're having to archive a load of data from the drive to tape then once that's done we'll try the tape-disc-tape solution..

Thanks for the confirmation about the tape drives though...

DS