You said, “we're planning on replacing our LTO3 drives with LTO4s entirely but want to utilize the many LTO3 tapes that we still have.  The problem that we have is that Netbackup sees these tapes as different media types/densities because ACSLS provides it that way and therefore i can't mount "hcart3" tapes into an "hcart" type storage unit in Netbackup.  Has anyone experienced this and know of a workaround?”

Migrating to a new generation drive technology that provides R/W compatibility, but CAN’T write to previous-generation media at the higher density

The following steps should be taken to implement this type of migration with NetBackup software. A typical example of this would be migrating from LTO2 to LTO3.

1) Replace all of the old drives with new drives. Depending on how the NetBackup device configuration wizard automatically configures the new drives, or how they may have been manually configured, the drives may need to be reconfigured to match the drive type of the old drives. This is necessary so that the new drives can read the existing media. Changing the drive type can be accomplished by right clicking on the drive in the Media and Device Management GUI. NetBackup software will automatically configure LTO drives as HCART, LTO2 drives as HCART2, LTO3 drives as HCART3, and LTO4 drives as HCART. In this case, if migrating to LTO3 drives, the LTO3 drives would need to be reconfigured as HCART2.

2) Define storage units for the new drives and add backup policies to use those drives.

3) The new drives should provide higher capacity and speeds than the old drives. However, since the new drives cannot write to existing media at the higher density, you may no longer want to use that media for backups. If you DO want to continue to use existing media for doing backups, then no other steps are required. When using both types of media for backups, backups will potentially take longer due to the lower density of the older media and you may span backups across dissimilar media.

4) If you no longer want to use existing media for backups, you should freeze the tapes, so NetBackup can only read from them. After all images on a piece of media expire, it becomes unusable. You can use the bpmedialist command to determine which media have become expired and frozen.

5) Once the media has expired, it should be removed from the NetBackup image and media catalogs by using the bpexpdate command. The following command can be used to remove a single piece of media (media_id) from the catalogs:

/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpexpdate -m media_id

6) Next, the physical media should be removed from the library. This can be accomplished by ejecting the media.

7) Finally, use the NetBackup Administration Console to delete the volume from the NetBackup volume database.

Don Peterson

Product Manager, NetBackup

Information Management Group

Symantec Corporation

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