George Sinclair wrote:

1. We might need to go back beyond the browse policy at some point. In
most cases, the data lived under a single file system that was as big as
300+ gig. That's a lot of data to read through when doing a saveset
recover, so being able to recover older versions of the client indexes
would save time. This got me thinking that we would need to clone the
client indexes also -- every one of them. Can you clone an index same as
any other saveset? Anything tricky that we should be aware of?

An index save set is just a save set. You can clone it. You may not need
to clone every one, just one every now and again. For example if your
browse and retention policies are month, you can almost get away with
cloning just one index per month, but never more than a month apart. You
would be much safer to clone one per week in this case, just for
redundancy and allowing for potential past backup failures.

2.

Can't quite get my head round that one - too early in the morning.
I think you might need to experiment.

3. Does anyone have any advice about this cloning saveset/index approach
to freeing up those tapes? From now on, starting with the next fulls,
we're thinking to backup the current data to its own pool of tapes so it
will be the only thing on those volumes. Then we won't have to worry
about non-related data being on those new tapes, and we'll never recycle
them. This will avoid this problem from reoccurring in the future.

This is a very sensible approach for the future, but hey we can't always
predict what's going to happen. Where I'm working we did all our monthly
backups with a 1 year browse and retention, then things changed, a new
regime of paranoia was introduced and all that already backed up data
now needs to be kept indefinitely, so all those retentions in the media
database have had to be changed retrospectively.

What you are planning to do with cloning the existing data and indices
WILL work, but it will be quite a time consuming exercise. There are a
couple of pitfalls that you need to watch out for.

(1) When you have cloned each of the save sets, what will happen to the
browse and retention on them? What will happen to the originals. You can
change the browse and retention of any particular save set using nsrmm,
this is perhaps what you will want to do. But doing this affects all
copies of a save set, so then your original won't expire.

(2) You must NOT change the status of the original volume to recyclable
because this will affect the clone too. You can recycle the original,
because this just deletes the copy of the save set on that volume. It's
more hassle to actually recycle the volume like this, since you need a
drive available and it take a few minutes, but it is the only safe way
other than deleting the volume which leaves you with an unknown tape
that you still need to label manually.

(3) Beware of continuation save sets, i.e. those produced by NW 5.x and
some of the Business Suite Modules. You need to clone an entire sequence
before relabelling the original volume, otherwise you will be left with
some invalid save sets. I haven't done enough research to find out if
there's a bug here.

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