topicsMultiple-Tape Catalog Backups

The basic concept behind the protection of large NetBackup catalogs is to split the catalog-backup process into two steps:

1. Back up the majority of the data from the images subdirectory on the master server.
2. Back up a small sub-set of the images subdirectory, together with the remainder of the NetBackup and Media Manager catalog files and directories from the master server and media servers.

Since the first backup contains the majority of the data, it must be able to span tapes. This is achieved by using a normal NetBackup job to back up the data. As a result of this normal backup, an entry is placed in the images subdirectory tree for the master server. This catalog entry allows the user to browse the catalog for files during a restore operation.

The second backup must back up the portion of the images subdirectory that contains the catalog entries for the master server, together with the other parts of the NetBackup and Media Manager catalogs. Since this is a relatively small amount of data, it fits onto a single tape. It must also be possible to recover this backup without the NetBackup catalogs being available. This is achieved by using the normal NetBackup catalog-backup mechanism to perform the backups.