what happens if you change media pools?

[ksnpc]

I'm not sure I know exactly how to word my question, but here goes. We use Brightstor 9. We've been doing a gfs rotation schedule where we do a full backup Tuesday and differential backups on the other weekdays. We keep a weekly set for four weeks, a monthly set for a year, and one monthly set per year gets pulled to the archive.

The rotation schedule was messed up and had to be deleted, so we have to create a new one. From what I understand we can't continue to use the same media pool. So if we re-do the tapes in our pool and re-assign serials, will the archived tapes still work ok? For example, if we need to restore a file and do a search in the database for it, will it know that it can go back to versions on those tapes?

Hopefully that makes sense. Thanks for any advice.
Shauna

 

[blister911]

Shauna,
I'm not sure if you can use the same media pool or not. I know I've done the same with our backup jobs and just put the same pool name in for the rotation. It complains that the pools already exist, but it lets you use them. Again, I'm not sure which version(s) I've done it with. We are currently on 11.1 for NetWare and 11.5 for Windows.

As for restoring media, if it isn't in the database when you go to do the restore, just run a merge on the tape(s) and they should show up on the restore page.

 

[blister911]

I should also add that I don't think you need to redo the serial numbers. Even if you have to redo the media pools, just adjust the next available serial number for each of the pools to be what the current (old) pools are indicating. Go to the properties of each pool and they should have 3 numbers dealing with the serial numbers: Base SN, Next SN, and range. Make the new match the old.

 

[blister911]

Check that: Maybe you can't adjust the Base and next, only the range.

 

[ksnpc]

Thanks for the quick response. I wish it would let us use the same pool but when we get to the point where it complains that the pool exists it won't let us go any farther. Oh well, I'll try to run the merge and see what happens - it sounds like what I'm looking for.

Thanks,
Shauna