Skip Hanson wrote:
> All,
> Hello again. As you may know we added scheduled cloning to the 7.6.1
> release. With your help we can continue to evolve this functionality.
> Therefore, I have a few questions for you regarding how you script nsrclone.
> 
> 1. In what scenarios are you doing this?


Pretty much everywhere.  In the one instance we're not, it's likely I may have 
to drop that too (I need to review if everything is backed up - we drop a 
manual backup into that dedicated disk).

Scripts go back to 6.1.3 and 8 x DLT7000 drives.  A second script was forked 
off that to leverage adv_file cloning in 7.1.3+ (and the benefits of a Tier 5 
DBO).

We will occasionally stage by script, but that's 'informal' and auto-stage in 
7.4.4 works much better now.


> 2. Do you make use of the -J option?


Not exactly.  One of my config arguments for Tape-Tape cloning is what node to 
clone them on.  Script will mount the first tape needed on the specified node, 
*then* kick off the clone command.

Disk-Tape cloning is designed around having one very large (5-10+ TB) disk 
device for each pool, on each main node.


> 3. Do you make use of the -d option?


It's not in 7.4.x


> 4. How do you schedule the clone operations?


Fulls are started on Saturday morning (one for each Node that has an adv_file 
disk), and will re-scan throughout the weekend to find new savesets on them.  
This is leveraging the nice read+write capability of adv_file, and we keep all 
Fulls on disk (no staging needed).

Our database (Sybase file) clones are run around 1 AM each morning.  Same base 
logic as above (re-scan regularly, end in late morning), as this pool also gets 
their own adv_file disks.

There are a couple 'smaller' disk-tape clone setups that also use this logic.

We still have one major Tape-Tape clone, for a short-term (two week) backup 
pool; Four different groups send savesets here piecemeal (by host), plus a 
bunch of manual backups.  It runs late on weekday mornings and finishes in a 
couple hours.


> 5. Would the ability to chain save groups or clone operations be useful
> (having a group or clone operation's execution tied to the ending of a
> previous operation)?
> 


We clone by pool (actually by adv_file disk in a pool), not by group.


> 6. Would the ability to have groups or clone operations just run once be 
> useful?


Unfortunately, no.

--TSK

=====
Tim Kimball     http://sungak.net
=====


> Cheers,
> Skip Hanson
> NetWorker Usability
> 


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