Networker

Re: [Networker] Protecting specific volumes / pools

2006-09-13 07:53:20
Subject: Re: [Networker] Protecting specific volumes / pools
From: Will Parsons <w.parsons AT LEEDS.AC DOT UK>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 12:49:02 +0100
Hi Steve,
The term you're looking for is "Auto Media Management". This gives Networker the right to over-write media volumes on which all of the save sets have expired.

We used to run a "Delete & manually re-label" system, until the current solution was put in place in 2003. We now set our Browse & Retention policies on each client to 28 days, so the media should become free after 28 days (+ about a week for dependant save sets to expire). We run 1 Full and 6 inc backups each week, so we rotate our tapes on a 5 week cycle.

This means that... the operators don't have the option of deleting/relabelling the wrong tape - because this disappears from their list of things to do.

To keep your new tapes safe, I'd recommend a new Media Pool, and a new Group. Use the Media Pool associations to direct data from the new Group onto these tapes. If the SOX data is "everything from the Notes server", then the Browse & Retention policies for the client could be set to 7 years. If it's just a sub-set of the data from the client, then you can create a second instance of the Notes Client , containing ONLY the SOX data save-set, and use the Group itself to force the data retention policy.

We use this for a once a month "tape out tape" for some systems... "savegrp -e year -l full Yourgroup". unfortunately you can't set the data life (-e year) in the group config, so you need a batch job to start savegrp with these parameters, rather than just letting the Networker Scheduler start it for you.

Hope that's useful?

From
Will

Law, Steve [UK] wrote:

Hi,

I'm no Legato expert but have a problem I'm hoping someone can help
with.
We currently use Legato (7.1.3 build 404 on Win2003) with a tape library
with a standard rotation cycle where the tapes are taken off site every
day and returned 2 or 4 weeks later depending on what day it is. We have
two pools, one ("DailyProduction") for the main data backups going to 3
tapes and a second ("DailyIndex") which just writes the indexes to a
dedicated volume, as we found that makes it much quicker to recover the
bootstrap and indexes etc in a disaster recovery situation.
We have a gang of guys who change tapes for us, and because we need the
tapes in the cycle to be overwritten, they delete the volumes from the
Legato volumes tab and then run batch file nsrjb commands which relabel
the tapes according to the day and week and the pools they need to be
in.
Due to SOX compliance mgmt now want specific files on our Notes servers
to be backed up daily, removed offsite daily and kept for 7 years. Our
solution is to introduce a new set of 5 daily tapes which will go round
and round and never be relabelled so that the Notes files (only about
700mb) keep being appended to these tapes until they fill up and are
replaced.
Our concern is that the tape changing guys will put these tapes in with
the rest and accidentally relabel them. To do this they would have to
first delete the Volume entry within Legato, but frankly we wouldn't put
it past them, even if these Notes tapes have a radically different
volume name to the usual daily data volumes. The nsrjb batch files
address the first 4 or 6 tapes in the slots (depending on whether it's a
weekday or weekend backup), but if the Notes/SOX tape was accidentally
put in these first slots, then it would be a temptation for one of the
tape guys to think "Weird name, oh well might as well delete the volume
entry just like with the others". And if there were 6 months of appended
backups on the tape, that would be bad.
So I'm looking for a way to make sure these tapes/volumes are appendable
but not relabel-able. Is there a way I can make volumes within that pool
"read-only" so they can't be deleted, but still appendable? Are there
extra ways I can protect the tapes in this Notes/SOX pool beyond setting
up a strict procedure to pass onto the tape changers?

Thanks,


Steve Law



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--


w.parsons AT leeds.ac DOT uk
UNIX Support
Information Systems Services
The University of Leeds
+44 113 343 5670

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