When people are just starting to get into NetWorker, a common situation is that they get confused about the difference between cloning and staging. (This isn’t helped given NetWorker can report in-progress staging operations as cloning – a perennial source of annoyment.)
So, what’s the difference?
- A clone operation is where NetWorker duplicates a saveset. It makes a registered copy of the saveset, and at the conclusion of the operation is aware that it has an additional copy.
- A stage operation is where NetWorker moves a saveset. It first makes a registered copy of the saveset, and then at the conclusion of the operation removes reference to the instance that it copied from.
Typically when we talk about staging, we talk about moving from a disk (media type ‘FILE’ or media type ‘ADV_FILE’) volume to tape. In such a situation where NetWorker stages from an actual FILE/ADV_FILE volume, it not only removes reference to the original saveset, but it actually removes it from the source volume as well. That’s to be expected – it’s a real disk filesystem that NetWorker is accessing, and removing a saveset is as simple as just running an operating system ‘delete’ command.
While it’s not often done, NetWorker does support staging from tape – but obviously when it’s done reading from the source volume, it can’t then selectively erase chunks of savesets from the source tape. Instead, all it does in that situation is delete, from the media database, the reference to the saveset having been on the source volume.
(In case you’re new to NetWorker and intend to now run off and try some staging – make sure, please, before you do, to read the second article ever posted on the NetWorker Blog – “Instantiating Savesets“. It has some very cautionary information about staging operations.)
One final thing – while I said that a clone or stage operation is done against a saveset, it’s not always as simple as that. If you tell NetWorker to clone or stage an individual saveset/saveset instance, that’s exactly what it will do. However, if you tell NetWorker to clone or stage a NetWorker tape volume, it will clone/stage the entire volume, with multiplexing left intact.
Regardless of those caveats though, remember the simple rule – a clone is a copy operation, and a stage is a move operation.