Kevin,
This isn't what Jack's trying to acheive. However, besides that it's a dangerous recommendation.
Automatic scheduled snapshots are rotated out by their naming convention. i.e. "nightly.0" is always last night's midnight snapshot. So, if for some reason the backup takes more than 24 hours to write to tape, or is delayed by a sheduling issue or a downed drive or whatever, you run the risk of a temporally inconsistent backup on tape after the snapshot rotation occurs. This might be made obvious by errors occuring because a file that was in the original directory map and was deleted during the backup disappear from the "nightly.0" snapshot when it's rotated for the next night (the previous night becomes "nightly.1").
i.e. you should always backup using the automatic "snapshot for backup.x" created by the NDMP client in Data OnTap, or use a manual snapshot. It is never wise to use the built-in scheduled snapshots for anything other than point-in-time restores from disk, because their contents will change at the next shedule period.
I agree with your comment about using a static name. But you need both the name _and_ the *contents* to remain static, which isn't the case with the OnTap sheduled snapshots.
A manual snapshot is always best for this, i.e. a script like: (using the snapshot name "dailybackup"
rsh filer snap delete dailybackup ;(delete previous manual snapshot you've hung on to for restores) rsh filer snap create dailybackup backup /filer/.snapshot/dailybackup/ ;(or for Windows create a share that always points to the root of the snapshot and use that)
regards,
Alan McLachlan ___________________________________ Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions Dimension Data Australia Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123 Fax +61 (0)2 62486346 Mobile 0428 655644
----- Forwarded by Alan McLachlan on 05/10/2004 02:20 PM -----
"Kevin Mascarenhas" KMascarenhas@syncsort.com Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com 01/10/2004 11:28 PM Please respond to "Kevin Mascarenhas"
To: "Jack Lyons" jack.lyons@martinagency.com cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Backups of Snapshots
Hi Jack,
One other option you can consider is specifying an existing snapshot as your NDMP backup source. For example, if you configured your filer to take nightly snapshots at say 11:00pm and had your scheduled NDMP backups start at sometime after that, then you could configure the backup job to use the "nightly.0" snapshot as the backup source. When a snapshot is specified in this way, NDMP driven dump will not create another one for backup.
Any backup software should allow you to define a job that uses an existing snapshot (or a snapshot that will exist at the time the job will run) for backup. Of course it's simplest if you configure the job to use a static snapshot name rather than one which will change each time the job is run so NetApp scheduled automatic snapshots will work perfectly.
HTH.
Kevin
Kevin Mascarenhas KMascarenhas@syncsort.com
Syncsort Inc. 50 Tice Blvd. Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677 Tel: (201) 930-9700 http://www.syncsort.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jack Lyons" jack.lyons@martinagency.com To: "Paul Galjan" galjan@gmail.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 6:45 AM Subject: Re: Backups of Snapshots
I guess that makes sense. it would have been nice to be able to look restore a snapshot directory from 4 months ago!
It looks like I could do a monthly snapshot manually and see how much
space
it takes up. Right now, my snapshots are only taking up 23% of the
space
allocated for snapshots. I am going to experiment with taking 6
"monthly
snapshots"
Jack ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Galjan" galjan@gmail.com To: "Jack Lyons" jack.lyons@martinagency.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 7:23 PM Subject: Re: Backups of Snapshots
Hi Jack,
The snapshot directory is not included as part of the NDMP dump. When the filer is told to do an NDMP dump, it actually takes a snapshot, then dumps the data from that snapshot.
--paul
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:41:11 -0400, Jack Lyons jack.lyons@martinagency.com wrote:
I had a user request a file from 4 months ago. The tape backups
happened
at 11:00 PM but the file they needed was earlier in the day. I was
thinking
that the backups might have included the snapshot directory but it didn't? Is that configurable?
Jack
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