netbackup newbie question. 1

[jdanilson]

we have just laid off most of our sysadmin talent including the one person who managed our netbackup. I admit freely that I am an idiot with netbackup. Please excuse the question but...

We run netbackup on windows to backup our linux (75%) and windows (25%) environments. We have exhausted our media and most backups last night failed. I have lowered the retention of all our full dumps from 6 to 3 months in an attempt to free up media but this seems not to work. I gather from other forums I have to run some command to actually get the expired images removed and therefore free up the tapes. If someone can walk me through this I'd be grateful.

fwiw, I don't find the doc very helpful but that may just be me.

John.

 

[Stumpr]

The images that were already written to with the longer retention do not change when you change the retention on the schedule.

You can use the GUI to find images that you want to expire in the "catalog" section.

Bob Stump
VERITAS - "Ain't it the truth?"

 

[jdanilson]

Stumpr,

I can't thank you enough. I did exactly that and now I have tons of space. Whew. Now I can do the backups before the boss figures out we don't have none. Much thanks.

 

[Stumpr]

Now I can do the backups before the boss figures out we don't have one" snicker, snicker

ahh yep!
been there many times ;-)

BTW thanks for the star.



Bob Stump
VERITAS - "Ain't it the truth?"

 

[jdanilson]

so now it seems to have plenty of volumes available but a manual backup for one of the failed jobs continues to fail. If I read the doc correctly it will only attempt to put the backup for host x on the same tape and if that tape's full and any unexpired backup exists it'll never be able to make a backup. Clearly there must be a way to tell this product to go find another unused tape but darn if I can find it.

This thing seems like it has all the bells and whistles, but I wish there was a simple switch somewhere.

 

[Stumpr]

check this out

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1388712

Bob Stump
VERITAS - "Ain't it the truth?"

 

[Snakefinger]

Make sure you have media in the library that has/have a volume pool designation of "scratch", or media corresponding to the designated policy volume pool listed in the Attributes tab of the policy containing the job you are attempting to launch via manual backup.

 

[Stumpr]

NetBackup does not allow different retention periods to be placed on to the same tape. If you have a tape that a 6 month image was written on then a 3 month retention backup will NOT use that tape. It will have to either create and use a new tape from scratch or else use a tape that only has an existing 3 month retention on it.


Bob Stump
VERITAS - "Ain't it the truth?"

 

[jdanilson]

it appears all the tapes (with a few exceptions) are in a group called netbackup. I'll take a look at this later tonight and may attach some images of the catalog so you can get a better idea.

In any case, thanks again Bob for putting up with my dumb questions. (fwiw, I'm a dba so glad to help with any db questions.)

 

[jdanilson]

the saga continues.

About ten jobs failed, seemingly the same ones continue to fail. There are ten tapes in the scratch pool so my guess is that somehow I have to tell netbackup that it can span tapes for a given backup so it will start a new tape. I've no idea where this setting might be.

 

[Frbutler]

if you are sure you want to use them and they have no valid images on them, just highlight the ones you want to use in the netbackup volume pool and right click...select change... then select new pool=scratch
It will move them all into the scratch pool for use by future backups

 

[jdanilson]

Thanks to everyone for all your help. We seem to be doing our backups fine now that I was able to expire some backups and get the tapes moved into the scratch pool.

Thanks again and Happy Fourth. Now let's go drink beer and burn some meat.

John

 

[smicro]

And stay away from DBAs. THey will ruin your whole netbackup environment!

 

[NickFerrar]

So true!

 

[mnews1]

Just an FYI about NetBackup retention periods...

Netbackup does allow multiple retention periods per tape (at least from version 4.5 and up). Select 'Host Properties' 'Master Server' from the left pane menu of the GUI, then click the Master Server in the right pane with the right mouse button and select 'Properties'.

A new window will open displaying the Master Server attributes. Select the 'Media' property in the left pane and select the 'Allow multiple retentions per media' checkbox that appears in the right pane.

Take care with these settings - they are global.

You may need to stop/start Netbackup for the changes to take effect.