Important Precautions to Observe

• Use only the methods described in the manual to back up the catalogs. The special backup operations described here are the only ones that can track all relevant NetBackup activities and ensure consistency between the catalog files.
• Do not use scheduling or backup methods provided by any other vendor.
• Do not rely on user backups or regular-scheduled backups. If you use these methods and the disk fails, the catalogs as well as the backups are lost and you may not be able to recover any data.
• Applies only to NetBackup Enterprise Server: If you are using media servers, manually alter the NetBackup catalog configuration to include the catalogs on the media servers.
• Back up your catalogs often. If these files are lost, you lose information about backups and configuration changes that were made between the time of the last NetBackup catalog backup and the time that the disk crash occurred.
• Never manually compress the catalogs. If you compress them manually, NetBackup may not be able to read them with its standard mechanism, the bprecover command.
• Keep a hard-copy record of the media IDs where you store the NetBackup catalog backups, or configure the E-mail global attribute. The E-mail global attribute causes NetBackup to send an E-mail that indicates the status of each catalog backup and the media ID that was used. You can then print the E-mail or save it on a disk other than the one that has the catalogs.
• If you back up your catalogs to disk (not recommended), always back up to a different disk than where the catalogs reside. If you back up to the same disk and that disk fails, you will also lose the catalog backups in addition to the catalogs and recovery will be much more difficult. Also, ensure that the disk has enough space for the catalogs or it will fill up and backups will fail.
• The NetBackup binary catalog is more sensitive to the location of the catalog. Storing your catalog on a remote file system may have critical performance issues for catalog backups. NetBackup does not support saving catalogs to a remote file system such as NFS or CIFS.