Help with backups and infor on possible upgrade to 6.5

[Scrapz]

Hello all I'm new to this forum so if there is anything that I post here that would be helpful to me somewhere else on this site let me know it would be appreciated. Thank you

Anyways I have a couple of questions conerning Netbackup. I'm finding it very frustrating with this software just to do the simplest things, I wish is was a little more straight forward then it is. Then again all the answers are probably right in front of my face.

1.) I have a 30 tape backup library and basically at this point I'm trying to figure out on how to utilize to its full potential. What I'm having issues with is I was wondering if it was possible if I could get the software only to use certain tapes on certain days. Like having tape 1 and 2 only run on Mon. and then have tape 3 and 4 run on Tues. and so forth. Is this possible or am I going to have to continously swap out tapes day to day?

2.) I was wondering if it was possible with the clients to be able to exclude drives from the backup. For example I just built a new server and it has an E: and F: drive. But all the other clients have a E: and D: drives. Now what ends up happening is I get multiple failures on the backup jobs, and what I'm getting from this is that netbackup will only allow to fail out a couple of times and once it has reached that limit it will stop all together tell me if I'm wrong.

3.) How do I get jobs to write to just one tape? If I have 30 tape library I don't find that it is necessary that I have to change out tapes everyday. Then whats the use? I'm trying to figure out How I can have one tape take on all the jobs for one night instead of having it span across a couple of tapes. I have LTO2 tapes in the drive and there is no way I'm filling them all up in one night backup. I think what is happening is because of the retention period the tapes are filling up so then its spreads over to the next tape, if I'm wrong let me know.

4.) Also has anyone upgraded from 5.1 to 6.5, if so is it as difficult as the instructions are making it out to be?

Sorry for such a long post, any help would be very appreciated. Thank you

 

[Martin999]

Hi,

1.

Netbackup will manage the tapes for you, it is not recommended to try and "micro manage" the environment. Now, I understand that you may want to use different tapes to prevent all one weeks backup being on one tape in case of failure, fait point. If so, just use a different schedule with the policy, and point to a differeent volume pool.

Do not swap out tapes unless you really need to, the more you handle a tape, the higher the chance of failure.

NBU writes to tapes using tar - nothing particularly amazing there. Its main purpose is to manage the tapes for you, so let it.

2.

You can exclude drives yes, use an exclude_list. This I think can be set from the GUI (properties of the client), or you can create manualy. The help page will cover it.
However, you will not get a backup. Better to fix the cause of the failure. Not sure if this would work, but if you multistream the job (so all drives at once), but don't allow multiplexing, the jobs will queue. A failure of one job will not effect the others. I would have to test that to be 100% sure.

3. You can set the maximum number of partially full media to 1, that way, it will fill a tape before moving onto the next.

4. No, but you must following the guides exactly. The databases must be consistant. Before you do it, make a full backup. Also, if you can, I would stop NBU and tar /usr/openv/* to tape, just as a get out.

Hope that this helps.

Martin