NBU catalog backup... 1

[B14speedfreak]

Hi all,

Thanks in advance for any posts and for reading.

We are using netbackup 5.1 on a solaris box. I have this question. We currently do backups of the netbackup catalog to disk (not tape I know its a bad idea but thats just the way that it is) and we then export these backups to different servers to form a backup (the servers file systems with the catalog backups are in term backed up via netbackup (so in theory if the worst came to the worst we should in theory be able to restore (we have more than 1 master server))). Anyhow the problem is, when the catalog is backed up by veritas to disk, we carn't shedule it, so when we come to do our exports, if veritas is trying to write to the file and shell is trying to RCP it to another server surely this will cause issues?

Anyhow my question is this, does anyone know if veritas fixed this with any of their patches/maintance packs?

thanks again,

B14... aka... Marky Mark...

 

[comtec17]

Fix this, there seems to be no issue with the product not working. If you are backing up the database, then nothing should be going on. Clearly you are going against all configuration rules doing this the way you are.

 

[B14speedfreak]

Hi,

Thanks for the post.

Yeah I know having read the configuration manuals that this is a bad idea. The problem we have is that doing this uses up a lot of tapes which is not ideal (since most of our tapes get changed daily). 1 site in the US is changed twice a week, but we found in the past that we ran out of tapes quickly since the backup of the catalog is a different format (do veritas own shares in the companies that make the tapes?!) Anyhow after a lot of experence this seems to be the only way that we can go to be honest. Is there a way of writing the backup to another tape drive on another box? We might able to backup to tape if we can do this.

Thanks again for the posts,

B14... aka... Marky Mark... the monkey in the server room...

...don't shoot the messenger....

 

[tbiller]

There is a section in Admin Guide1 for protecting large backups. I use it here as our catalogue backups run to over 300Gb daily, so it's a struggle. It's also scripted, and can be scheduled accordingly in cron.

You can back up the catalogue onto any media server that has connectivity into the Master. However, the speed of that link is critical.

You could consider assigning local tape drives to the Master over fibre, thus speeding them up.

How much data are we talking about? Are you able to schedule zero backup/archive/restore activity during the catalog backups?

Tim

 

[B14speedfreak]

Hi Tim,

Yes this really interests me actually. We are in the process of now planning out how to backup our catalog to tape and to disk.

At the moment the cat goes to disk then every so often it is RCP'd to another box. Anyhow I quite like the way that veritas backs up the catalog after every sheduled backup and our backup catalogs are not that big to justify a policy. The backups we are doing are for Oracle. The way that we work with Oracle is that we have another sepearte database that stores the backups (lets do recovery). Thing is to get good consistent backups I am under the impression that we could really do with backing this database up at the same time as the netbackup catalog to tape. Is there anyway I could do this??? It already gets backed up through a policy but really I think we are going to require it to be either backed up before or just after the rman catalog. Otherwise I think if we suffered a total system loss we might have issues getting the restores to work properly.

Anyhow let me know what you guys reckon,

thanks,

B14... aka.. marky mark...

B14... aka... Marky Mark... the frozen monkey in the server room...

 

[creakyjoe]

Hi, i've posted details of this before but can't find the posts, but he's a start -

http://news.support.veritas.com/dne...netbackup.datacenter.english&item=13052&utag=

Basically i have a cronjob that attempts to run a few times during the morning (and once or twice in afternoon) that opens an NFS mount on a.n.other server (that has a standalone tape drive) and writes a catalog backup directly to disk on that machine. Then this is written manually to a tape via basic tar command whenever we get chance. Obviously backups can't be running when the catalog backup is running so i have the script check that there are no bpsched processes running before doing the manual catalog backup. I have the script running half a dozen times or so in the mornings due to overrunning backups, so eventually the catalog backup gets a look in
Rich

 

[B14speedfreak]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Having had a word with my peirs we have decided to start doing both tape and disk backups of the catalog.

Think this should help us be a bit more resiliant (espcially since the disk backups also go to another server)

Just a question of getting the oracle side of things sorted out I guess...

thanks again for all the posts...



B14... aka... Marky Mark... the frozen monkey in the server room...