I'm pretty sure that backing up over NFS won't get any NT ACLS that might be in the filesystem. That may or may not be an issue for you.

There have been ONTAP/NetBackup integration issues. I've seen upgrades of ONTAP totally break backups and I've seen versions of ONTAP that cause unexplained downing of tape drives on just a handful of my filers (roughly 6 out of 14, different robots, so it is not hardware issue -- we use a cron job to up the drives regularly).

Things have improved since we began using NetBackup for NDMP 2 1/2 years ago. I understand that VERITAS has a standard test suite they run against major releases of ONTAP. They don't check the minor releases as far as I know, nor the patch releases. We users tend to do that :-).

Unfortunately, often we can't wait until NetBackup is qualified on a particular version of ONTAP. We are heavy users of the multiprotocol features of the filers and often require the latest version of ONTAP for bug fixes or features. We have a backup lab where we test things as thoroughly as we can... and still things slip by.

But it is not all bad. VERITAS with NDMP seems to be pretty rock solid for backing up filers. We are happy with the throughput of our backups, etc.

I'd do the same thing again.

Kelly

--

Kelly Wyatt, Kelly.Wyatt@SAS.com Senior Systems Programmer Strategic Recovery SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Drive / Cary, NC 27513 http://www.sas.com SAS... The Power to Know

-----Original Message----- From: Shaun T. Erickson [mailto:ste@research.bell-labs.com] Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 9:55 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Veritas & Filers, or: to NDMP or not to NDMP ...

... that is the question.

I am switching from BudTool to Veritas Netbackup. It seems, if I understand things correctly, that I can either back up my filers over NFS, or I can use NDMP and back them up to a locally attached tape drive, or to another filer with a locally attached tape drive.

NDMP seems the way to go, for performance and speed reasons. However, I stopped using NDMP with BudTool, because everytime I had to upgrade either BudTool or OnTap, I ran into compatability problems between the differing NDMP implimentations.

What has been the experience of those of you who are using Veritas and have tried the above solutions? Which method do you suggest I use, and why?

-ste