critically<\/strong> important when it comes to guaranteeing anything but last-backup recoverability.<\/p>\nWhat does this mean?<\/p>\n
In short, as soon as a backup hits its retention period in NetBackup, it’s toast \u2013 it’s a goner.<\/p>\n
Irrespective<\/em><\/strong> of whether there are any backups of the same filesystem\/data set that requires the “outside retention” backup for recovery purposes.<\/p>\nI can’t sum this up any other way: in a backup product, I see this as recklessly irresponsible. It provides a focus on media savings that even the most miserly bean cruncher would admire. Well, until the bean cruncher’s system can’t be recovered from 6 weeks ago to fulfil audit requirements.<\/p>\n
Reason 2: True Image Recovery is “optional”<\/h3>\n
If you’ve grown up in a NetWorker world, where the emphasis has always been, and will always continue to be on recovery, this will, like the reason above, make you soil yourself. Imagine having a full backup plus six incremental backups of a directory, and wanting to recover the filesystem from last night. Now imagine just selecting the full plus the incrementals for recovery and getting back everything<\/em> generated during that time.<\/p>\nEven the files that had been deleted between backups. I.e., you don’t get back what the filesystem looked like at the time of the backup that you’re recovering from, but what it looked like for every backup<\/em> that you’re recovering from.<\/p>\nNetWorker, once, in the 5.5.x stream implemented this. It was called a BUG<\/em><\/strong>. In NetBackup, it’s a “feature”. In order to enable a correct recovery, you have to turn on “true image recovery”, something that takes extra resources, and is typically advised that you keep the data just for a small cycle (e.g., 7 days) rather than the complete retention time for the backups.<\/p>\nThere’s another word for this: Joke<\/em>.<\/p>\nOn another front…<\/h3>\n
As recently as December I mentioned that I wished EMC would get their act together and implement inline cloning \u2013 one of the few things where I saw that NetBackup had a distinct competitive advantage over NetWorker.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was the glow of the cider, but I had an epiphany in Copacabana on a hill watching (probably illegal) fireworks in Avoca and Terrigal on new years eve. Inline cloning is no longer a compelling factor in a backup product. Why? Media streaming speeds have reached a point where companies with serious amounts of data just should not be implementing direct-to-tape backup solutions any more. Inline cloning was developed at a time when you’d want to generate both sets of tapes as quickly as possible, but only companies with very small data sets will find themselves not backing up to some disk unit first (be it say, ADV_FILE, or VTL, in NetWorker), and those companies won’t be constrained on backup\/clone windows to a point where they’d need inline cloning anyway.<\/p>\n
When not backing up direct-to-tape, there are several factors that mitigate the need to do inline cloning. In organisations with a very strong need for offsiting, there’s replication at a VTL or disk backup unit layer. In organisations that just need a second copy generated “as soon as possible”, doing disk\/virtual tape to physical tape cloning following the backup should be fast enough to handle the cloning at appropriate performance levels.<\/p>\n
In other words: there’s no need for EMC to implement inline cloning. As a technology, it’s a dead-end from a tape-only time. I feel somewhat silly this didn’t occur to me sooner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought it about time that I cited the two key reasons why, if faced with a choice between NetWorker…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,5,16],"tags":[228,313,314,481,486,623,1249,789,1252,1008,1029],"class_list":["post-1731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-backup-theory","category-networker","tag-cloning","tag-dependencies","tag-dependency","tag-inline-cloning","tag-insurance","tag-netbackup","tag-networker","tag-recoverability","tag-recovery","tag-tir","tag-true-image-recovery"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-rV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7582,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions\/7582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}