Gurus,

    I'm a little new to NB, and I'm hoping that some of you can offer some
advice.

    I'm currently attempting to backup approximately 25 Solaris 9 systems,
most of which use a Veritas-HA NFS server as the primary storage for non-OS
related data. 
    
    Additionally, there's a clustered (again, with Veritas-HA) system
providing Oracle and MySQL database services, and another for providing mail
services.

    Total, there's about 280 gig of data currently that's needing to be sent
to tape, though I anticipate growth into the 500G range within the next year
or so.

    Backups are to be done by a NB Enterprise 5.0 MP4 system with a Overland
Neo 2k 26-slot DLT library. I'll be bringing in a second library of the same
type, and an additional 500G of RAID-5 storage to add to the backup server
for disk-staging. I'm also adding a Vault license to the mix for managing
tapes to be sent off-site.

    My problem is, is that I can't seem to wrap my head around these darn
policies & pools. This is going to be my second attempt at getting a
workable system in place, and I think my first attempt failed because I'm
either not accustomed to thinking about things in a scheduled fashion, or
because I'm just to dense to absorb the concepts required to make it all
work.

    Schedule wise, I'd like to come up with a way to provide daily backups
with a short retention period for those "oh crap" moments. I'd also like
Weekly, monthly and Yearly backups that will get rotated off-site for
storage. 

    daily tapes rotated every 14 days
    weekly tapes rotated out every 6 months
    monthly, same deal but a 1-yr rotation period
    Yearly backups are kept for 7 years

    So I guess what I'm asking, is how would you folks configure pools and
barcodes and such? I just can't seem to wrap my mind around this darn thing.
My original scheme was to do the following;

    Full backups on Sundays, sent to the 'Full' pool
    Cumulatives on Monday, Wed, Fri, sent to the 'Cumulative' pool
    Differentials on Tue, Thur, Sat, sent to the 'Differential' pool.

    That doesn't seem to be a very good policy, since managing it all turns
into this giant mess, and for some reason expired tapes never seemed to
expire properly - they'd just stop showing up in the media db and never get
overwritten.. figuring out which ones needed to go off-site was a pain too..

    I'm obviously missing something, and I'm hoping someone can provide me
with some info so I can have a 'Eureka!' moment where it all clicks..
    
    Any help would be appreciated, even if it's just pointing me in the
right direction to some good reading..

    -Jeff
--
 Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist
and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not
raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.