Backup Copy Pool

[Kay4Scuba]

We are backing up our primary pools to copy pools to be taken offsite. In one of our onsite DR tests we missed a tape that needed to be copied to the offsite pool. The reason was that a tape drive was not available. Have any of you had any experiences with this? I did not see any message in the activity log indicating the tape was missed. Is there a way to guarantee that all of the tapes in a primary pool are copied to a copy pool when the backup stgpool command runs?

 

[nasrm]

I am not sure if I understand this correclty. How did you know you missed a tape?

As far as I know, the backup stgpool is an incremental. if you did miss a tape, TSM should copy that tape the next time it runs the backup stgpool.

 

[Kay4Scuba]

The way I knew that we missed a tape is that we were performing an onsite DR test. During the test I mark all of the primary pool tapes as unavailable and the DR copy pool tapes as read/only. When one of the restores was kicked off - it tried to mount the primary pool tape because there was not an equivalent backup for the file on the DR copy pool. I searched the activity log and found that it asked for a mount of that tape during the backup stgpool process but the mount was never done.

 

[tzong]

if one tape failed to be backuped, there would be some failture infomation in the actlog table, and at leats one of the backup processes would return failture. Futhernore, when you did the onsite DR, why was TSM trying to mount the primary pool tape.

 

[Kay4Scuba]

There were no messages in the activity log indicating a failure. I went to support with this issue when it happened., We were running 4.1 software. We are now on 5.1.50 and I'm hopeful that it will log a message. The reason it picked up the primary copy was because there was no offsite copy of the backup. The admin issued a restore of the data - that data was on the onsite pool but not the offsite pool.

 

[n9kws]

It is possible that you did not miss a tape at all. If your using diskpools, and are not backing them up on a daily basis that may be the problem. It seems as though the diskpools contents are not transfered to tape during the tapepool backup, as a result they need to be handled seperately.



Can somebody else confirm this?



The down side to this, is of course that you need to recreate and restore the disk pools at DR.



Andy.