In regard to: Re: [Networker] Merits of cloning versus dual backups?, Dave...:

>I'm new to cloning, but I'll interject a point or two here.  I haven't
>seen my clones run more than one source and one destination tape, even
>when I feed nsrclone a large list of ssids that I know exist on
>different tapes.  Maybe that list needs to be split and delivered to two
>different nsrclone processes running at the same time to utilize writing
>to more than one drive?

More or less, yes.  You need to optimize it a bit, so that you don't have
two `nsrclone' processes each wanting to use the same source volume to
write different savesets to their respective clone volumes, but otherwise
you're right.

>Also, I found it very useful to split the clients I was going to clone
>into their own group and run them at a time when other savegroups aren't
>running.  This had the advantage of easier-generating the list of ssids
>(now I only had to key off group=ToClone in the mminfo report instead of
>lots of client=XXX fields,) and keeping the multiplexing down (or at
>least limited to a set number of tapes) when they were backing up in the
>first place.  That made the cloning go faster.
>
>Cloning is kind of neat, but I'm still not entirely sure it's required
>in my environment.  A non-Networker tape-duplicator to store the
>originals offsite would probably work just fine for me.  Maybe that
>would work better in your situation as well.

If you use a high (for some definition of high) setting for # of savesets
that get multiplexed to any device at a time, cloning can be a big win
if you need to do a big recovery, because it de-multiplexes your
savestreams.  If you use a very low setting for # of savesets that get
mixed together, it's not as big of a win.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                              mooney AT dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak DOT edu
Information Technology Services         (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
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North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164

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