If your Disk fills up before the backups complete does NBU automatically know 
to roll those images to tape, or do you have to manually kick that process off?



-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Jenkins [mailto:Steve.Jenkins AT SPARROW DOT ORG]
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 10:13 AM
To: boatm005 AT groupwise.umn DOT edu; rlh AT lsil DOT com;
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Backing up to disk (and then tape ??)


We back up about 20 percent of our stuff to disk.  It's especially
effective for clients connected over a slow link, avoiding tying up a
tape drive for a long period of time.

The basic concept is that we defined a disk storage unit, which is just
a directory on disk somewhere.  The images are written as files to this
directory.  I have a script that kicks off at the end of the night.  It
lists the file names and builds a bpduplicate job that creates two new
copies of each image, copy 2 and 3, making copy 2 the new primary (all
basic options from the admin manual).  These two new copies are on
tapes, one to stay in the robot (copy 2), one to go offsite.  Once the
duplications are successful, the script runs bpexpdate to expire the
disk image (copy 1).  

If througput becomes an issue, I can split it into multiple
bpduplication jobs.

Works pretty slick.

             Steve

>>> "Paul Boatman" <boatm005 AT groupwise.umn DOT edu> 9/15/03 10:42:17 AM
>>>
Wow,

Great question.  I am interested in this as well. Our robots go widely
un-utilized during the day, and then get maxed out at night during the
backup window. We just don't have the bandwidth to finish everything
during that relatively small backup window. Any increase in performance
makes a HUGE difference for our site.

- Paul

>>> Richard Hellier <rlh AT lsil DOT com> 09/15/03 09:34AM >>>
Folks,
        In various recent threads, some people have mentioned using
"backup to disk" (and then (e.g.) dup'ing to tape) as a way of
accelerating backups, getting reduced backup windows etc.

        If you are doing this, could I ask you, please, to let me know
some details of what sort of equipment you're using, any gotchas with
this
approach?


        I'm asking because our current 1.8 Tbyte data volume looks set
to 
grow to 5-6 Tbyte and I don't think our current approach (ATL P3000 +
5 DLT drives) will scale to that sort of data volume.



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