Offsite Archive for DR

[dpoulson]

Hi,

I'm just working on building some extra disaster recovery into our backup strategy and would like to ask if the following is right and feasible. (4.5GA Datacenter on solaris)

Currently, all backups are done to an L180 with 4xLTO1 and 4xLTO2 drives. Backups are running great (thanks to help from this forum!) but we have no offsite storage of the backups. We are looking into getting another media server and backup device to do remote copying to another site (100Mb link). If we do get another server, can I just do a duplicate of the last nights images (probably only once a week) to the remote site's media server?

Thats the long term solution. In the short term we have a L8 library with 1xLTO2 drive. If I set up a script to do the duplicate to this, can I take the tape out to store offsite, and restore the images using standard tools. i.e, the main site is destroyed and we have no NBU server or catalogues. I have been lead to believe that when using bpduplicate any multiplexed images are demultiplexed and can be read with the standard tar program. Lastly, if this is OK, how can I get the media id of the last tape written to in the L8 so I know which to remove?

If anyone has any better solutions for this, please share!

Thanks,

Darren.

 

[estech25]

My recommendation for your offsite storage is, you define a separate volume pool for your offsite storage and freeze media before ejecting it and taking it to offsite storage. This way you dont need a way to manually keep track of last media written.

 

[dpoulson]

Hi,

Thanks for that. I hadn't thought of freezing it. I already have a seperate pool for offsite archives, and have a script which automatically creates the archive copy for me. The question is, how do I know which tape to freeze/eject? Is there any easy way to tell which media was written to last, or was used in the last 24 hours?

Thanks.

 

[Stumpr]

Media Written" report is available on the GUI.

Bob Stump
Just because the VERITAS documentation states a certain thing does not make it a fact and that is truth.

 

[dpoulson]

Hi,

I was hoping for a command line option to put it all into an automatic script.

I've just found my solution...

bpmedialist -hoursago 24 -media

Cheers,

Darren.

 

[johnny99]

Basicly I do the same, but I wonder why should I freeze the volumes that I eject from my "offsite" pool?

/johnny