[Veritas-bu] Any thoughts on this "hack" to avoid import?

Hello veritas-bu'ers.

I'm interested to hear if any of you experts have any thoughts on my current scenario.

We have recently moved on from a NBU 5.1 on HPUX environment to NBU 6.5 on Linux (with a different master server name). Mainly because of urgent requirements at the time, I just created a new master server, installed NBU 6.5 from scratch, and didn't bother about integrating the NBU 5.1 catalog.

Now the HP server has been decommissioned, and it's time to do something about the long term (7 year retention) backups.

Last week, I started Phase 2 import on a spangroup (connected set of tapes) of Lotus Notes backups. I left it running over the weekend. It ran for 3 days, and only got through 3 of the 1,000 or so tapes I have to import. At that rate, it's going to take over 3 years to get all the imports done. Aside from the constant monitoring, that basically means one expensive (IBM 3592) tape drive in use constantly for 3 years, and a constant drain on our cross-site fibre bandwidth.

However, I seem to have found a "hack" that allows me to restore from these old backups, without having to import the tapes.

I have found that you can copy the catalog entries from the old catalog to the new one, then edit the *FULL index files, replacing the old master server/media server name on the FRAGMENT records with the new master server name, and the backup image appears completely normal in the new system, with all the right attributes, including expiry date, and can be restored from.

I wrote a small script to automate the catalog file modifications, and managed to get these 7 years worth of backups cataloged in the new NBU server, in about 20 minutes, as opposed to 3 years of importing. I tested several restores, and it all works perfectly.

The only issue seems to be that that NBU doesn't know much about the actual tape. I have all the old tapes in a seperate volume pool called "imported", which no policies can (should) EVER write to. (feature request for Symantec? - read only volume pools). When I do a bpmedialist on one of these tapes, NBU/EMM thinks it's unassigned. I have a list of when all these tapes are due to expire on the old system, and my current plan is just to check this list periodically and move them from the "imported" pool to the scratch pool when they are due (I'll probably script this bit aswell).

It all makes perfect sense to me.

I guess this post serves two purposes:
1: To see if any seasoned experts see any problems with this approach.
2: To catalog this "hack" on this mailing list, for posterity :)

Cheers!
Dean

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