Media Conversion from Netbackup to TSM

[jimbomlac]

Hi,

Is anyone aware of a way(product) that will allow me to intigrate my Netbackup media into a TSM environment?

 

[comtec17]

There is no other way other than to restore the tapes to a central disk and then back them up again with TSM.

 

[jaric1]

Please don't tell me that ! We are migrating our netbackup (UNIX) to TSM and restore & backup is just not an option as it would take forever, due to us having to keep 7 years worth of monthly backups. There has to be some way for TSM to 'import' legacy data. I know nothing about TSM as another team is currently running it, but netbackup is simply a flat file database. Running netbackup in parallel for 7 years is also not really practical.

 

[comtec17]

There is no way for TSM to do this. The data is written differently and there are no hooks between NBU and TSM. There are some PS companies who can do this for you but it is very costly (Somewhere around $500 per tape).

The TSM database is not flat file, it is a relational database that houses pointers to the files on the tape. There is no way to migrate databases or tape information between the 2.

The only option in this case is to restore the tape and then back it up using TSM.

I would suggest keeping a stand alone server around with NBU on it to do your restores as needed.

 

[Yrrk]

Most companies that go through this kind of process will retain the previous infrastructure (in your case netbackup) around for as long as retention requirements dictate and then retire it on the off chance they need to restore that old data. The old system is not retired until the data backed up to it is no longer required for retention. Since most restores are done to restore the most recent copy of data, this generally implies the old system won't be used much, if at all. It's there to satisfy retention requirements.

Depending on how complex your environment is, you may have some portion of your data that involves infinite retention or really long retention requirements. For that data you will indeed have to restore it and re back it up. There is no way to convert from netbackup to TSM as has already been pointed out. This is pretty much the norm though when switching from any backup software to another.