NetWorker has long supported a volume location field; this can be shown in the GUI, and can be set and reported on via the command line tool, ‘mmlocate’.
One of the most typical ways that mmlocate is used is to set that a volume’s location is “Offsite”. For example:
# mmlocate -u -n 800841 Offsite
Thus, when you look at the volume in the GUI (or run the command: mmlocate -l Offsite), you’re able to see that the volume is offsite.
However, somewhere in the 7.3.x cycle, EMC introduced an offsite flag that could be associated with a volume, and this fulfills a very different function. First, in order to set the flag, you need to use the nsrmm command, and it would work like this:
# nsrmm -o offsite volumeName
Such as:
# nsrmm -o offsite 800841
This doesn’t set the location field. (Nor, equally, does a location field of ‘offsite’ equate to a flag set for offsite.) If you want to manually clear the offsite field, you can run the nsrmm command again, using the flag ‘notoffsite’ rather than the flag ‘offsite’. Alternatively, as soon as the volume is either (a) mounted in a standalone drive or (b) imported into a tape library, the flag is cleared.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no way of querying for volumes based on this field. (I consider this to be a silly mistake, and hope it’s rectified soon.)
So, what is this volume flag used for, if you can’t query it, and it’s not displayed anywhere? It actually fulfills an important function. I briefly covered that function in my post, Instantiating Savesets, but I’ll quickly revisit it now.
NetWorker assigns a unique clone ID to every saveset copy that is made (be that through cloning or staging). The clone ID is effectively the number of seconds past the epoch, or if not that, some other very similar number of seconds.
When NetWorker wants to use a saveset to facilitate a recovery, and there’s no copies of the saveset immediately online (i.e., in a drive, or in a library), it must request a volume that holds a copy of the saveset. Previously it would always ask for the saveset with the smallest clone ID. This would create problems if you backed up to disk, cloned to tape, then staged to tape later – the clone would end up with the smallest clone ID, and if neither volume was available, NetWorker would ask for the clone volume, rather than the ‘original’, staged volume.
To solve this problem we use the ‘offsite’ flag for the clone volume: if NetWorker needs to read from a saveset that has more than one copy, and one of those copies is stored on a volume that is flagged as ‘offsite’ in the media database, then it is least likely to pick that volume.
(An alternative technique advocated by EMC (and even Legato, before the acquisition), before the development of the ‘offsite’ flag, was to temporarily mark the initially requested volume as ‘suspect’ so that NetWorker would instead request the ‘preferred’ volume. While there’s technically nothing wrong with this technique, I find marking good backups as bad – even temporarily – as inelegant. With the availability of the ‘offsite’ flag instead, I’d encourage anyone still using the ‘suspect’/’notsuspect’ flags to switch.)