The only possibility I can imagine is to isolate the media in some way.
You can't change the pool because it's allocated (well, you can, but
don't do that). You may be able to change the volume group, but I'm
neither positive that will hide it from Vault nor all that sure you'll
actually be able to use the tape if you take it outside of the group for
the robot in which it resides.

That said, I'd probably just kill the duplication. You'll pick it up on
the next pass anyway, assuming you've got your Vault lookback windows
more than a day long.

If refreshes like this are something you have to do even 5% of the time,
you might consider running backups, at least for the systems on which
refreshes will periodically be requested, to disk first, and duplicate
from there to tape. That way you can always perform a restore while the
dupe is still running.

Did that come closer to answering your questions?

--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group Inc, Unix/Linux/VMware Sysadmin / Backup & Recovery
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556 


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Lightner [mailto:jlightner AT water DOT com] 
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 5:03 PM
To: bob944 AT attglobal DOT net; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Preventing duplication from using tapes

The duplication scheduling fits fine 95% of the time.  Refreshes are
done as requested by environment owners rather than on a regular basis
like duplications.  Typically we use the latest backup which is why we
try to preclude use of the tapes for other purposes rather than mucking
with the entire duplication schedule for these randomly scheduled
refreshes.

I already know the purpose of "suspend" and "freeze" - as noted in my
post I'm looking for a way to suspend (or hold or preclude or whatever
other word your thesaurus suggests is better) that is like "suspend" but
does prevent duplication from reading them.

The obvious work around is simply to kill the duplicate that has the
tape busied out at the time I need it so it will free the tape - I was
just hoping there was another way to frontload this.

NBU 6 "reserves" tapes and "drives" for running operations and I was
thinking perhaps there was a way to do a "reservation" before actually
starting the restore at some point after the backup and before the
duplication would normally pick it up.

Since everyone is answering questions I didn't ask I'm assuming the
answer to the one I did ask is "no".

-----Original Message-----
From: bob944 [mailto:bob944 AT attglobal DOT net] 
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 3:46 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Cc: Jeff Lightner
Subject: RE: Preventing duplication from using tapes

> Is there any way to mark a tape temporarily in such a way that
> Duplication would not select it but it would still be available when
> restore did? [...]
> While suspending the
> tapes prevents them from being used by backups on the original host it
> does not prevent the duplication job from selecting the tapes 
> to mount.

Suspend and freeze are designed to prevent writing to tapes, not reading
from them.

> We do eventually want the duplication but want to defer it until the
> restore is done so need a method similar to suspending a tape that

Your scheduling design does not fit your scheduling needs.  If
duplication should give the restores X hours or days before it
duplicates, change the lookback window in the vault profile (or whatever
you're using in place of vault) for those tapes so that it waits that
long before selecting their images for duplication.
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