On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 11:11:30AM -0400, George Sinclair wrote:
> You make an excellent point! I guess I can see that cloning would be
> reasonably efficient if you were dealing with incrementals or small
> savesets, but when we run fulls, we're talking about a lot of savesets,
> some rather large, for a total of maybe 200 savesets or more across as
> many as 6 tapes. Now, how on earth would I have time to wait for
> NetWorker to read through each of those savesets and clone each one?
> Granted, you're not dealing with the network, so you've eliminated that
> bottleneck, but still, I mean in a 4 drive box, Networker could only
> clone savesets from two different tapes at a time, which would still
> leave two more to go. In our other library, it could only clone savesets
> from one tape at a time since that library only has two drives, which
> would leave one tape to go.

I'm new to cloning, but I'll interject a point or two here.  I haven't
seen my clones run more than one source and one destination tape, even
when I feed nsrclone a large list of ssids that I know exist on
different tapes.  Maybe that list needs to be split and delivered to two
different nsrclone processes running at the same time to utilize writing
to more than one drive?

Also, I found it very useful to split the clients I was going to clone
into their own group and run them at a time when other savegroups aren't
running.  This had the advantage of easier-generating the list of ssids
(now I only had to key off group=ToClone in the mminfo report instead of
lots of client=XXX fields,) and keeping the multiplexing down (or at
least limited to a set number of tapes) when they were backing up in the
first place.  That made the cloning go faster.

Cloning is kind of neat, but I'm still not entirely sure it's required
in my environment.  A non-Networker tape-duplicator to store the
originals offsite would probably work just fine for me.  Maybe that
would work better in your situation as well.

Dave

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