On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 05:11:40PM -0500, Terry Lemons wrote:
>
> Our group did backups of ~160 servers into a single backup pool (the Default
> pool, in fact). We used a single pool for the obvious reasons of
> simplifying our NetWorker setup, ensuring the best utilization of the tape
> media (if you have multiple pools, you have a greater chance of one pool
> running out of media, while another pool had plenty, etc).
So you avoided complexity of multiple pools by creating a complex script
for cloning...
> Our site had a data retention strategy that dictated 5 different retention
> periods (1 year, 2 year, 5 year, 7 year, and 10 year, I think), based on the
> criticality of the data, legal, governmental, and corporate requirements,
> etc. So, we could not use NetWorker's automatic cloning mechanism, because
> it places all savesets in the same backup clone pool. In almost all cases,
> the retention period for all data backed up from any one system was the
> same.
I would have set up a different pool for each retention policy.
>
> So, here's the question: is this a useful idea, so useful that NetWorker
> should be enhanced to do it? Do you need to clone to different clone pools?
> Does your data have different retention periods?
Yes, our data has different retention periods. We have 4 different periods:
Incremental backup are retained for 15 days. Full backups for a month,
except for the last full of the month, which is kept offsite for six months.
Except for financial data which is retained "forever"
Having one tape pool for this would be inefficient, because (and we
experimented with this) you can't overwrite the incremental backups
on the tape while keeping the full backups. i.e. the tape wouldn't be
recyclable until all the savesets are expired.
What we do instead is to have a pool for each retention policy. We have
one series of barcode labels, however, and the pools are set to recycle to
and from other pools (except for the "forever" pool, where we always use
brand new tapes).
The operators see a single big pool of tapes, and any recyclable tape is
"fair game" for whatever pool is needed now.
Networker is fairly efficient at filling up the tapes. I generally see
6 non-full tapes in the jukebox (which has 3 drives): 3 from each pool.
I look for how many recyclable tapes are in the jukebox, and if that falls
below the number of tapes we need for the night (15 over the weekend), I have
the operators load more tapes from the "scratch" pool
(mminfo -q volrecycle,location=Vault)
All this without cloning. If I had to clone (say to have a copy to send
offsite) I'd do volume-based cloning when the backups are done, or set the
"Clone Pool" option in the savegroup and do it automatically. (which now
works, since I upgraded to 6.1.3)
--Joe
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