The way to avoid the bpchangeprimary step is to offsite your copy 2 (since
copy 1 is default primary copy).  

If copy 1, onsite, expires before copy 2, then copy 2 is automatically
promoted to primary by Netbackup.  

-M

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu]On Behalf Of Dave Markham
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 4:31 AM
To: Paul Keating
Cc: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] duplicating tapes for offsite storage


Paul Keating wrote: 
What do most of you folks do?
Use inline copy to write two tapes at once?
Use Vault to create a second copy during off (daytime) hours?
One copy, and retain onsite for a week or two to meet SLA, then ship offsite
for reminder of retention period??

Paul
I have various methods employed depending on when i set the system up for
each customer we host :)

The first method is having a separate policy which does full backups each
night of key folders required to rebuild a DR site. The tapes used in this
pool are identified by some scripts i have which check all the DR clients
have been backed up etc. This tape list is removed and sent of site daily,
with a 1 week retention.

Another project i have does the same but has daily off site incremental and
fulls. This i fear is a bad way to go as it's going to interfere with the
normally daily incremental and weekly fulls. Im not 100% sure how netbackup
deals with multiple policies or multiple incremental backing up the same
files.

The latest way i have gone which i think is the best is use ITC to a
separate tape pool. This does indeed copy what you do for normal backups and
so everything you need for DR backups you need to have on normal backups.
This seems best as it doesnt mess with file times and doesnt hit the network
twice for file transfers. The only issue with this is when restoring you
need to change system to look at the second tape copy instead of the normal
one. This is done with :


bpchangeprimary -copy 2 -sl <schedule> -cl <client> -sd mm/dd/yyyy ( -ed
mm/dd/yyyy ) - This changes copy 2 (i.e the offsite copy from an ITC job) to
be the primary copy. The primary copy is what netbackup uses to do its
restores from. this e.g is for a client and has start date and end date and
schedule shown. 
Thats just a note from my blog. theres other options to the command to suit
your needs. Below is helpful for verification of this :-


bpverify -PD -M <master server> -X -s <start date> -e <end date> -cn 2
-client <client> - This will give the output as the gui does for showing
info on a client between dates of an image which is copy number 2. The last
field on the output is 0 or 1. 0 = not the primary copy. 1 = is set to
primary copy. Can use this to check before and after you use
bpchangeprimary. Other options can be used such as -sl <schedule> instead
of/aswell as -client 

To identify these ITC tapes which have been backed up to send off site  i do
the following :-


bpimagelist -hoursago <number> | awk '$2==2 {print $9}' | sort | uniq  


This is wrapped in a script with various variables and other things to check
jobs are not running and has a failsafe hour etc etc.


hope this helps
Dave