While I touched on this in the second blog posting I made (Instantiating Savesets), it’s worthwhile revisiting this topic more directly.
Using ADV_FILE devices can play havoc with conventional tape rotation strategies; if you aren’t aware of these implications, it could cause operational challenges when it comes time to do recovery from tape. Let’s look at [...]
The scenario:
A clone or stage operation has aborted (or otherwise failed)
It has been restarted
It hangs waiting for a new volume even though there’s a partially written volume available.
This is a relatively easy problem to explain. Let’s first look at the log messages that happens. To generate this error, I started cloning some data to the [...]
NetWorker has an irritating quirk where it doesn’t allow you to clone or stage incomplete savesets. I can understand the rationale behind it – it’s not completely usable data, but that rationale is wrong.
If you don’t think this is the case, all you have to do to test is start a backup, cancel it mid-way [...]
Periodically someone will tell me that they don’t need to clone because they run cross-site backups. I.e., they’ll have an architecture such as the following:
Sample cross site backup configuration
Looking at a tape-only environment for simplicity, this configuration sees the backup media immediately off-sited by virtue of the tape library being physically located in another [...]