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 \u2013 a perennial source of annoyment.)<\/p>\n
So, what’s the difference?<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
While it’s not often done, NetWorker does support staging from tape \u2013 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.<\/p>\n