[Networker] Use of symbolic names for backups?

Hi,

I have a question here on the use of the '-N' option with the savecommand. What is the real value of using this? Does anyone have anyadvice, admonishments or bad experiences they care to share?

I've tested this, and it appears that it simply replaces the standardsave set name with whatever you use instead. So, something like:


'save -s server -l full -N slash /'

would back up the root file system, and mminfo would report it as'slash' and not '/'. Otherwise, everything else., e.g. nsrinfo,nwrecover, recover, 'recover -S ssid', etc. appears to all work as usual.

It seems kind of cool in some respects. For example, if you had adirectory named '/3/exports/data001', you could back it up numeroustimes using 'save -N data001', and at some point in the future, youcould move 'data001' to another file system, or maybe even to anotherserver, and still have the same save set name (data001) show up inmminfo for all the various instances. So for reporting purposes, I cansee that this might make things easier, and, of course, it does allowyou to query on that symbolic name. *BUT* it kind of bothers me that thereal path name isn't also listed. There could be times when you mightwant to see the real path name to know where that directory or entitylived on the client at the time of the backup. Would be nice ifNetWorker recorded both. As near as I can tell, however, the symbolicname is not used for anything other than the save command itself. Whenusing nwrecover and command line browsable recover, I still see the realpath. The man page for recover doesn't indicate any way to specify thissymbolic name, so recovering by save set still requires the ssid with anoptional full path name, and still reports recovering files within, say,'/' to target_dir and not recovering files within 'data001' to target_dir.

Perhaps if you have very specific directory name(s) that would not beused anywhere else then this might make mminfo queries slick, but ifyou're using a specific pool for the backups, wherein only those savesets write to that pool, you could simply query based on that pool, andparse the save set names for the directory portion of the path. Wouldn'tthat achieve the same thing?


George

--
George Sinclair
NOAA/NESDIS/National Oceanographic Data Center
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