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Re: [Networker] Can someone confirm the following about "scratch" tapes or "scratch pools" ?
2008-03-27 05:54:47
Bruce Breidall wrote:
One other related question. When volumes in a production media pool become
recyclable, they will stay in that pool unless they are relabeled into
another. What i would like is not only a dedicated scratch pool, but when
tapes become expired it would be nice for them to be automatically labeled
into the scratch pool again, ready for the next request from whatever
group source backup.
I don't see any advantage if that was to happen, in fact there is one
disadvantage. By relabelling recycled volumes into a scratch pool you
would lose all chances of restoring data from these tapes. OK I know
they are recyclable and you are not supposed to want to restore from
them, but the fact remains that by scanning them or restoring an earlier
index it IS possible to recover data from them, and some would say this
is a good thing in certain circumstances.
In any case, this is not something NetWorker is designed to do, and
doing this would be an extra unecessary tape operation.
It seems to me that in order to be able to do that you would have to set
recycled from pools in the group sourced media pool, so that every pool
could grab volumes from any other pool (as long as the scratch source pool
has recycled to pools yes).
It is usually a good idea to set most pools to recycle to and from other
pools. Then if you need to know how many tapes are available for backups
you can just do a simple mminfo query to count how many recyclable tapes
are in your jukebox. For this purpose there is no need for a dedicated
scratch pool.
This seems very messy and a candidate for trouble, and an ugly way to do
something the product should automatically do by default. I see a possible
workaround to run a scheduled script that finds recyclable volumes in
production media pools and relabel to the designated scratch pool.
I don't see this as at all messy or ugly, and don't see how it would
cause trouble. The product has behaved like this for many years and I
don't know of any problems caused by this. Running a script to do this
would be a little pointless IMHO and just causes unnecessary work for
the jukebox.
Does this make sense to anybody?
Only if they have worked with another backup product that requires you
to work in this way.
It is possible to create the concept of a scratch pool in NetWorker, but
this is most useful for new tapes. You can create a pool called scratch,
with the "recycle to other pools" flag set, and use this for labelling
all new tapes into. A little script to then mark all tapes in the
scratch pool as recyclable is then useful to complete the picture. This
is useful if you are not keen on the Auto Media Management feature (as
in my case).
There is no other reason IMHO to use a scratch pool.
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