One question you’ll periodically see raised in NetWorker forums is … “why am I getting a bootstrap backup with every backup?”
The answer is actually a fairly simple one: if the backup server is in an auto-starting group, then every time that auto-starting group is run, you’ll get a bootstrap backup.
However, if the backup server isn’t in any group that automatically starts, the server will act to protect the media database and configuration files by doing a bootstrap backup with every backup. That way, between the bootstraps and indices backed up with every backup, there’s a good chance that the backup server will be sufficiently recoverable.
In more recent versions of NetWorker, you’ll even see an alert to tell you when this has happened:
[root@tara ~]# savegrp -c test01 AFTD 3:savegrp: Added 'tara.pmdg.lab' to the group 'AFTD' for bootstrap backup
While some people erroneously think otherwise, electing to not backup the backup server itself is a completely unsound, unsafe and unrecommended data protection strategy. Always make sure your backup server gets backed up daily, with full backups at a suitably regular interval, and make sure those backups are cloned, and tested, as well.
I still don’t get the need for bootstrap backup every time when group is scheduled to run but schedule says “Skip”. I have data which rarely changes and we back it up monthly to tapes. So the schedule is something like “full backup every first day of month and skip every other day”. We don’t have large organization and only one Networker server and files which we back up are on same server as Networker. And Networker writes bootstrap every day when this group runs. I had to implement dedicated pool to bootstrap because of this(and some other similar groups) or else we had to hold tape/s for this/these pool/s inside the library the whole month. I understand the importance of bootstrap but this feature is still annoying.
If the schedule is set to skip you shouldn’t be seeing a bootstrap backup occur with the skip. Although, if I’m reading your statement correctly you’re saying that you actually only backup once a month?
But I see. Somewhere was statement that if Networker server is client in active group then it backs up bootstrap every time and you can do nothing about it. And yes, we back up certain data only once a month because there is very few changes or it doesn’t change at all.
Hi Preston, I’m wondering if you could do a poll/report on how people deal with their bootstraps? I know what some of the best practices are (hardcopy offsite, digital copy to external email in case network is down etc) but i’m wondering if there are any other solutions others have come up with? For example, in our company I have to come up with a new solution, keeping a hardcopy in one of our other buildings is not an option nor storing it offsite as our boot strap reports are very LARGE (1k+ pages), though we may still consider it, digital copy to external email is fine but we need at least 2 other options to be redundant.
Hi,
Certainly if your bootstrap is that large I wouldn’t advocate printing it. However, realistically – when it comes to DR, you’re likely to only want to recover from a bootstrap generated in the last 0 to 72 hours, so in that scenario I’d suggest printing a truncated version while keeping in email format the full versions.
Most sites tend to stick with internal and external emails. Printed copies of bootstrap going offsite with media is becoming rarer these days – I’d say only about 50% of companies I know of with daily offsiting still do this. Most have switched to electronic handling of the bootstraps.
Cheers,
Preston.
We also do another thing with the bootstrap report: we send it to an external e-mail account. Gmail… Hotmail…
In case you need to DR(fire, meteorite, bomb), you might not have the paper available and your internal e-mail might also be down.
So you open the external e-mail and phone your vault service for the right tapes…
We all hope it will never come to this.
But that’s what we’re paid for!
Michel