Pretty much everyone understands full and incremental backups in NetWorker. A full backup is a backup of everything, and an incremental is a backup of everything that has changed since the last backup, regardless of what level that is. On the other hand, differential backups can sometimes throw people out for a while longer; particularly [...]
The cockatrice was a legendary beast that was a two-legged dragon, with the head of a rooster that could, amongst other things, turn people to stone with a glance. So it was somewhat to a basilisk, but a whole lot uglier and looked like it had been designed by a committee. You may be surprised [...]
A while ago I became aware of some bugs to do with NetWorker probe based backups. While they worked without issue in 7.6 SP1, it turned out that in 7.6 SP2 and 7.6 SP3, an issue was introduced which prevented them from working as desired. A probe backup typically runs with the following logic: Execute [...]
I’d like to suggest that we should specify that “percentage complete” estimates – be they progress bars or sliders or any other representation, visual or textual, need a defined unit of measurement to them. And we should define that unit of measurement as a maybe. That is, if a piece of software reports that it [...]
In December last year I posted “7 new years backup resolutions for companies”. Since it’s the end of January 2012, I thought I’d check in on those resolutions and suggest where a company should be up to on them, as well as offering some next steps. Testing – The first resolution related to ensuring backups [...]
Continuing on my post relating to dark data last week, I want to spend a little more about data awareness classification and distribution within an enterprise environment. Dark data isn’t the end of the story, and it’s time to introduce the entire family of data-awareness concepts. These are: Data – This is both the core data [...]
A common theme of question asked by people new to NetWorker is whether it supports a push or pull recovery model. The answer, as you’d expect for an enterprise backup product, is both. However, the recoveries processes aren’t named push and pull. If you’re not aware of push and pull recovery models, they work thusly: A [...]
We’ve all heard the term Big Data - it’s something the vendors have been ramming down our throats with the same level of enthusiasm as Cloud. Personally, I think Big Data is a problem that shouldn’t exist: it serves for me as a stark criticism of OS, Application, Storage and Software companies for failing to anticipate the [...]
A recurring theme on the NetWorker Mailing List is people not understanding how Automedia Management operates in tape libraries. Here’s the complete list of what automedia management does when enabled for a tape library: It enables NetWorker to automatically label and use any blank tape (i.e., a tape that does not have a NetWorker label [...]
So a new version of NetWorker has come out, or is coming out, and it’s been decided that you’re going to upgrade, but you want a few tips for making that upgrade as painless as possible. Here’s my 5 rules for upgrading NetWorker: Read the release notes. If you’re not going to read the release [...]
