Storing only current files offsite

[dmorgan92]

Forgive me if this has been answered, but I cannot find the info on this anywhere. Currently we have an archival history of all of our backups up to one year. This is a lot of tape, and we want to begin to begin keeping an offsite copy for disaster recovery. Here is my question. Because of the incredible volume of tapes, how can we only keep a recent history of our backups instead of the entire stgpool? Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks for any help. :grin:



dmorgan

 

[sthoppay]

Looks like you are not tapping the potential of TSM.



You defined the management class properly with your requirements? Are you running reclaimation?



If you like to just delete the volume history information, you can use a del volhist command to remove the old entries.

 

[dmorgan92]

Thanks for the response. I'm sorry, I wasn't detailed enough in my description. We are keeping 1 year of backups by design. (That's the way the people upstairs want it) Anyway, the offsite copy would only be needed in case of a catostrophic occurance, and they want only current files moved offsite to try and save tape. I know this may be a stretch, but I was hoping there was a way to narrow the scope of an offline backup to where only a couple of weeks worth could be moved to a certain number of tapes.

(We are reclaiming with a good results. When I took over this job, they were not and it was a good mess.)



Thanks again.



dmorgan

 

[crazymad]

The offsite data will always has the same retention as the onsite data. That's the purpose - you have to have a backup of your primary stg. pool to be able to reconstruct it in case of a disaster. So data will have the retentions specified in a particular copy group through which the data was stored in the primary stg. pool.



We need to keep data for some nodes for 1 and 3 years. We deal with this with std. retention of 92 days and doing an export of particular nodes every month, and these exports are sent offsite than. Another possibility are backupsets, depending on your environment.

 

[dmorgan92]

The backup sets look like they might work. If I am understanding this correctly, these are set up for each client and you could set the retention for one week and back it up every week. Then take the tapes asociated with that backup set and store them offsite. :grin: Great tip. Thanks!

 

[crazymad]

Yes, but there are some withdraws:

1) it only backs up active versions (in your case it is probably not a problem).

2) one node requires at least one volume (tape). This can be quite costly for small nodes.

3) I am not sure if DRM module can take care about it, so you will probably need to write some scripts...

 

[mricca]

What exactly does Export Node do? I see you do them once a month on certain nodes. What do you use as a rule of thumb on the nodes you do exports on? By the number of files? Retention period?

We have a couple servers that the data has to be kept forever on...medical. Wondering how to achieve this.

 

[crazymad]

EXPORT NODE's purpose is mainly for transfer data among TSM servers. So you can export data and keep them in a vault and in case of need you can import them back later. Exported data is "self sufficient" (like backupsets), description data from database is exported too. So there is no database load.

Nodes for which we do exports are set with a policy with 92 days retention period and NOLIMIT versions. Due to this, we are able to do a point in time restore within last 3 months.

You can export active data only (result almost the same as backupsets) or all data (backup/archive). See help.

We do these "monthly backups" for production servers.