OK, I'll bite. NBU, as of 5.x did not work as you suggest - STUGs. Any available will work - however, you're not going to pickup where you left off because the media databases are not a shared resource. Lose a storage unit, start over. That's not redundancy in my book.
Oh, and by the way - the "incredible" software that I'm referring to is trading at $10 higher than Symantec, was purchased for the cost of one year's maintenance, handles disk MUCH better than NBU, never had to deal with things, such as NBCC, because their various catalogs and databases are stored in a relational database, come whith a robust reporting an capacity planning engine (no $60K or more on Bocada, Aptare, etc.), has monitoring and alerting capabilities - goodbye thousands of lines of code written to support NBU......I could go on, but you're clearly happy with your backup solution. Enjoy!
===================================
Steven L. Sesar
Lead Operating Systems Programmer/Analyst
UNIX Application Services R101
The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road - MS K101
Bedford, MA 01730
tel: (781) 271-7702
fax: (781) 271-2600
mobile: (617) 519-8933
email: ssesar AT mitre DOT org
===================================
> > Ah I was looking for the equivalent of FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER
> > but only when the exsiting restore media server is busy.
> >
> > This would make a lot of sense, yes?
>
> It makes a ton of sense! And, other data protection
> application vendors
> get it. I was performing a bake-off with another vendor and I
> inadvertently left 5 out of 6 media servers powered off. To
> my surprise, the next morning when I came in, backups had
> transparently failed over to the single, remaining media
> server! That's redundancy for you! This redundancy mechanism
> also applies with storage units. If one storage unit is for
> whatever reason unavailable, it'll fail over to a second,
> third, fourth.....however many redundant paths you have a
> particular storage policy to use.
Steve - addressing your backup anecdote (and forgetting that the
original question was about restore), what is the difference in that
_incredible_ software you describe--capable of using the sole
operational media server, bypassing unavailable storage units, leaping
tall buildings with a single bound--versus using the default "Any
Available" or the simple STUG in NetBackup? <yawn>