On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 07:42:28AM +1000, Preston de Guise wrote:
> While the idea would be nice in theory, I think in practice it would  
> be a nightmare, and open NetWorker administrators (particularly  
> inexperienced ones) up to making some terrible mistakes.

Depends on how it was implemented.  I'd love a single command that would
move/copy all set fragments on one volume to another.  (Since I don't
think the DB would like fragments outside a complete image, I think it
would be limited to a "move").  I shouldn't be able to make any mistakes
that way.  I might want this to replicate data off of a suspect volume.

> To put a counter-argument, which may sound blunt or uncaring: IMHO if  
> you're worrying about media utilisation on individual tapes, your  
> company isn't providing sufficient budget for you. Obviously we have  
> to on an overall scale be congisant of the amount of media that we use  
> within backup, but I often find that wanting (or needing) to get to  
> that level of granularity comes from budgetary pressure to be miserly.

Last time I wanted this, I had a data destruction order from the
business.  Unfortunately, one of the things not be destroyed on the same
tape was a very large backup that was on about 10 other LTO tapes.  That
set had to be replicated in its entirety chewing two tape drives for the
duration.

If instead I could delete the saveset to be destroyed, then tell the
backup program that the tape is suspect and I wanted all non-expired
data to be copied to new volumes, that would have helped a lot.

-- 
Darren

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