Fbackup vs Netbackup

[Chris Vail]

We'll be renting a tape library for an 8 week project. They want to back up their data nightly, if possible, otherwise on weekends. We're already using Netbackup for our TSAN solution on 80+ other hosts, but this system is on an isolated LAN, and they don't want these backups mixed in with the others. This has to be an unattended backup of about 900GB.
What then is the consensus view of the group here? Should I go ahead and get a small Netbackup license, or just stick with fbackup running out of cron?
The advantage of the Netbackup is that we can monitor it with Openview, by our 24 hour operations staff. Netbackup operates the autoloader nicely, and we're familiar with it. I don't recall that fbackup can do auto tape loading, but I'm willing to learn. Any ideas?

Chris

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

On it's own, fbackup can't do tape loading but you can script up some stuff around the 'mc' utility.

Another option, is to load DataProtector (OB2 5.0) (or OmniBack II 4.x). By an amazing coincidence, OB2 comes with a 60 day evaluation license that is fully functional - which just fits your timeframe. OB2 will easily do the library manipulations. You might just find that you like it more than NetBackup.

[Chris Wilshaw]

Using fbackup with a config file, you can specify the option

chgvol <script>

Where the file defined by script contains the command to run when a change of tape request is received. The contents of this would depend on the commands used for your library.

[monasingh_1]

Since you are familier with netbackup It will beeasy to roll in this new backup in the current landscape. I think you can very well connect these lans and just use a different Media server or different media pool to separeate the backup data, I understand that you will still will have same netbackup database but as long as medias are separate(not necessary though) you can always import them later on a different netbackup server if needed.

Not sure with OBII, but netbackup data can be restored using tar(supplied with netabckup) as well.

If you go OB5.0 route you may need to learn and set things from scratch which may take a week or so properly set it and you only have 8 weeks.

hope this helps..

[monasingh_1]

Since you are familier with netbackup It will beeasy to roll in this new backup in the current landscape. I think you can very well connect these lans and just use a different Media server or different media pool to separeate the backup data, I understand that you will still will have same netbackup database but as long as medias are separate(not necessary though) you can always import them later on a different netbackup server if needed.

Not sure with OBII, but netbackup data can be restored using tar(supplied with netabckup) as well.

If you go OB5.0 route you may need to learn and set things from scratch which may take a week or to properly set it and you only have 8 weeks.

hope this helps..