How do YOU implement cloning, off-site storage and etc? 1

[ShawnL]

I'm pretty new to the product and just wanted to see how other users used this option.&nbsp;&nbsp;We used to use arcserve, so that when the end of the month came, we took that full backup tape and put it in the safe to save it.&nbsp;&nbsp;Since Legato doesn't work like that (specific monthly tapes and etc), the only option I've figured out is to clone all the full save sets at the end of the month and then eject them out of the library and put them in the safe.&nbsp;&nbsp;We have over 60 clients we are backing up and anytime I've tried to do clones, it's a very time consuming process and very manual.&nbsp;&nbsp;IT also ties up the drive for a long time, which isn't good when they are needed for backup.&nbsp;&nbsp;I just wanted to see how other people manage their stuff and see if they could give me any ideas to make this easier.&nbsp;&nbsp;I would like to have a system like the old way, where at the end of the month I could take out tapes with full backups on them and put them in the safe, but any suggestions would be great.&nbsp;&nbsp;How do you implement your off-site storage?<br><br>Thanks!!!!

 

[avedis]

Offsite storage in our environment is done daily. We have contracted a company to come get the DLT cartridges, and store them in fireproof offsite location until we call them back.<br><br>We call tapes back for recovers, and a script automatically sees what expires each day, and prints out a list which we send to the storage company, and they return the expired tapes the next day for reuse.<br><br>We have scripts that tell what volumes are full each day, and extract them from the jukeboxes. then they are sent offsite<br><br>As for cloning, that is something we have no use for in our environment.<br><br>Hope that gives you some info.

 

[ShawnL]

Sounds interesting....&nbsp;&nbsp;would it be possible for you to provide me with those scripts?&nbsp;&nbsp;I may be able to utilize them to some extent.&nbsp;&nbsp;So, do you not have a need to keep your data in any kind of permanent storage?&nbsp;&nbsp;You only need to keep day by day?

 

[Guest_imported]

We run incrementals during the week and then a full backup on the weekend.&nbsp;&nbsp;The full is then cloned and the clones are sent off site.&nbsp;&nbsp;Clones are returned in three weeks (They are not browsable after ~3)On the weekend closest to the end of the month we send the clones off for a year.

 

[ShawnL]

What kind of setup do you have?&nbsp;&nbsp;As in tape library and etc?&nbsp;&nbsp;How many drives?&nbsp;&nbsp;Howe long does it take you to make the clones and do you find that that affects your backups?

 

[avedis]

ShawnL:<br><br>&nbsp;Our tapes stay offsite until they expire (14 days to 2 years) every day we receive tapes back.<br><br>&nbsp;I would gladly supply you with the scripts I wrote, but most of them were written by an outside contractor, and are copyright, and neither myself or my company 'own' them.<br><br>&nbsp;The ones I wrote work with the ones i cannot distribute.<br><br>&nbsp;This may help out more...<br>&nbsp;To get a list of what tapes have filled up within the last 24 hours to send offsite:<br><br>&nbsp;(these commands are for use in HP-UX 10.x They may have to be modified depenting on your platform)<br><br>&nbsp;mminfo -s {server name} -av -q&quot;full,volaccess&gt;=yesterday,volaccess&lt;=today&quot; -r&quot;barcode,pool,written&quot;<br><br>&nbsp;Then remove the tapes from the library, set their location to: &quot;Offsite&quot; <br><br>&nbsp;mmlocate -u -n {volume} &quot;Offsite&quot;<br><br>&nbsp;(Setting the location to Offsite is an important step for the next part to work)<br><br>&nbsp;Now to find when tapes expire that are offsite so you can call them back.<br><br>&nbsp;mminfo -a -r&quot;barcode,type,pool,state,location&quot; ¦ grep &quot;E&quot; ¦ grep &quot;Offsite&quot;<br><br>&nbsp;That will return a list of offsite tapes that have expired.<br><br>&nbsp;Any questions, let me know.<br><br>&nbsp;Brian Wolf

 

[ShawnL]

Thanks....&nbsp;&nbsp;I think your commands will help out a bit...&nbsp;&nbsp;I'm running NT, but everything is still basically commandline driven with a GUI wrapper.&nbsp;&nbsp;From what I can tell, the unix commands are the same as the nt commandline parameters, so I think this should work out... thanks for the info!!!

 

[Guest_imported]

We have two Qualstar tape libraries, 22 AIT tapes each.&nbsp;&nbsp;Two AIT drives in each Qualstar, and an external AIT for restores during cloning or swap for a failed drive.<br>We back up somewhere around 150 GB over the weekend starting friday night, cloning is done before Sunday.&nbsp;&nbsp;Backup speeds are helped significantly by switched fast eathernet between all of our servers including the backup server.

 

[SimonBenn]

Hi,

You don't state whether you have an Offsite facility. I'll assume not.
The is the easiest way of doing it is to do the backups in an offsite location. You then get decent DR. If you have enough data this may work out cheaper in media.

The cloning process is very inefficient so we tried to optimise it. You will need at least 3 drives so that you can always have 1 free for restores and saves. The best way we have found is to write a mminfo command that spits out all non cloned savesets in the order they lie on the tape and feed those into nsrclone.

Using this method we can do 6 or 7 DLTIVs a day.

The other way is to dump the tape to a disk device and nsr_stage from that. I'm told it gets better in 6.0. We'll see.

Regards,

Simon. [sig][/sig]