Media Management - Netbackup Newbie question

[joenok]

Netbackup 4.5 on Windows 2000 server. - I created about 15 media id's in the netbackup volume pool, gave them all retentions of 1 week for diff's and 2 weeks for full. it used the first 6 tapes then it wanted to go back to the 2nd tape without trying the others (7-15). I have looked at the Media pdf file from veritas, but it didn't help much. anyplace that I can learn more about retentions. I thought it was pretty self explanatory when I set it up - that is until it didn't work. What does Netbackup base it's selection of volume id it uses?

Joenok

 

[comtec17]

It selects it by retention period. Lets say you have 6 pieces of media, 3 were used last night( 11-16-03 ) using a retention level 2 or 2 weeks and finished running at 10:00 PM. Now tonight you run a backup of a client using a retention of 2 or 2 weeks. It will use a different media since the media used the night before will not expire until 11-30-03 @ 10:00 PM. due to an image on the tape.

Retention periods are more for when the image (backup) will expire on that tape, not for the entire media. If you specifie in the global attribute of the NetBackup server that you want tapes using multiple retention periods (NOT RECOMMENDED) then you will be able to use the same media more than one day.

Hope this helps...

 

[joenok]

thanks Comtec17, so why didn't it try to use my 7th tape, it insisted on tape #2 that the retention was up on but I thought it would try to use the unused tapes first, then go back to the retention tapes.

thanks again!

 

[comtec17]

Do you have a scratch pool defined?

If you run bpmedialist it will show you which tapes are active, when they will expire, if any are frozen or suspended and so on.

 

[joenok]

I tried to look up the term frozen or freezing, I noticed that it was "freezing" one of my tapes in the reports screen under media logs. I'll try to create a "scratch Pool" what will that do for me? Will it just make it easier to add to my main pool or ???

thanks for the help, Netbackup is a real beast.

 

[comtec17]

A scratch pool is used to place media not used in. A volume pool will use the scratch pool for new volumes as it needs them. So if you add new tapes to your library or autoloader, you can have the new tapes placed into the scratch pool.