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The administrator can also generate reports that show:
• What is physically in a robot?
• Discrepancies between what is physically in a robot and what is shown in the volume database.
Scratch Pools
Media manager enables administrators to configure/enable scratch pools. When applications such as VERITAS NetBackup and
Storage Migrator need additional (new) media, they can obtain new media from the scratch pool. Scratch pools can be local
to a single storage unit (library), or can be configured across multiple storage units. This allows administrators to add all new
tape volumes to the scratch pool, rather than statically assigning new media for use by specific applications.
When configured in a NetBackup master/media server storage domain, the media pool capability can significantly reduce
operator effort. For example, assume that one of the libraries in a NetBackup storage domain has run out of free media to
use. Utilizing the scratch pool feature, NetBackup can automatically and transparently acquire a scratch tape in any library in
the NetBackup storage domain that has free media available, and use it as the media for the backup.
Spanning Volumes for Large Images
When a backup image is too large to fit on a single volume, VERITAS NetBackup fills each volume to capacity and then
automatically spans the image to another volume. This makes the most efficient use of media and is especially useful when
backing up large images, such as are commonly encountered with databases. If for some reason, spanning volumes is not
desired, the administrator can disable it.
Tracking Media Age and Number of Mounts
Because the possibility of media failure increases with age and use, Media Manager keeps statistics on how old the media is
and how often it has been mounted. The administrator can choose to expire the physical media based on date or a specified
number of mounts.
If VERITAS NetBackup suspects a media failure (usually due to repeated write failures) it suspends use of that volume.
Similarly, it will shut down a storage device if a drive fails. In either case, VERITAS NetBackup logs the reason for the action in
the error database and notifies an operator to correct the problem.
Media Overwrite Protection
Many environments have media written by applications other than VERITAS NetBackup. In these instances, it is important
that the old media not be accidentally overwritten thus destroying what could be valuable data. To prevent this from
occurring, VERITAS NetBackup provides overwrite protection for a number of different formats, including tar, cpio, and ANSI
labeled.
By default, VERITAS NetBackup refuses to overwrite a protected format. It is possible to override this behavior, however, so a
site can reuse the media for VERITAS NetBackup images if desired. This option can be useful when phasing over to VERITAS
NetBackup from an application that uses one of these protected formats.
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V E R I TA S N e t B a c k u p R e l e a s e 3 . 4 Te c h n i c a l O v e r v i e w
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