On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 15:03:26 +0100, Daniel Jerram
<Daniel.Jerram AT MARLBOROUGH-STIRLING DOT COM> wrote:

>We currently have an 8 drive SDLT unit which backs up the trunck of our
>data, however we need to use our tapes more efficently we seldom have many
>full tapes during the week day evening backups which is a Level 1 although
>it will use up to 8 tapes in one go due to the drive availibility.
>
>We have therefore come to the idea about cloning the tapes and then
deleting
>the originals to ensure only the correct number of tapes are used.
>We would then reuse the none cloned tapes again.
>
>Now the problem we have is that the clone media does not keep the index
>information so that when we delete the actual backup tape the none clone
one
>we loss the client index and if a restore was needed we'd have to scan a
>tape in...... how bad is that!!!
>
>So does anyone have any ideas how we could have a clone style pool which we
>can clone too which then holds valid index information so that when we
>delete the originals the index information is kept.
>
>The Cloning operation is scripted but will not clone to a pool which isn't
>clone status.
>
>We are using Networker 6.1.2 now on Windows 2000 sp2.

The direct answer to your question relates to the way you are deleting the
originals. If you positively delete or recycle the originals it should not
remove the indices for the clone tapes. However if you just mark the
originals as recyclable, your indices will be lost. I will qualify this
response by saying that I probably haven't tried it this way round, i.e.
deleting the originals rather than the clones.

I think you have chosen an unusual solution to your problem. It seems a
rather inefficient way to do it, spending time cloning then deleting the
originals. I can think of a few other ways to look at your problem, mainly
relating to adjusting parallelism or target sessions settings, perhaps from
a script on a timed basis. The other way to solve your problem would be to
spread your fulls through the week rather than doing them all at weekend,
thus each day you would do a mixture of level 1 and fulls and get much
better tape utilisation, and better throughput too. I assume that you are
taking your tapes away on a daily basis, if you were not then you wouldn't
have a problem.

I've thought of yet another way... If you send your level 1 backups to a
different pool you could restrict that pool to use only a small number of
drives. That should do the trick.

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