Someone else asked me about this - I wasn't using the "official" term.
Veritas refers to this as "Multiple-Tape Catalog Backups" and it's
described in the System Administrator's Guide (page 181, specifically,
in the 4.5 FP3 SA guide).

I had a problem backing up catalogs that Veritas never could figure out.
It wouldn't write to tape or disk any faster than about 3 MB/s. Now that
I use this method, my catalog backups run at about 65 MB/s.

matt

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 05:36, William Enestvedt wrote:
> Matt Beal wrote, during a discussion of Catalog sizes:
> > 
> > ...switch to the two-stage catalog backup method. bpbackupdb does
> > not make use of the NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS and SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS 
> > settings, instead using a default blocksize of 32k, and ran WAY 
> > too slow to our LTO-2 drives. I'm now able to back up the catalog 
> > in less than an hour, with write speed peaks up to 105 MB/s.
> > 
>    What's the "two-stage method" of backing up the Catalog?
>    I have three groups of backups to run each night, and the automatic
> Catalog job is starting to eat into the later backup windows! The
> customers won't budge, so I'm looking into either shell-scripted Catalog
> backups or whatever trick you're describing. :7)
>    Thanks.
> -wde
> --
> Will Enestvedt
> UNIX System Administrator
> Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI
> 
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