Hi,

We use Netbackup Veritas for Unix which performs robotic backup on tape drive massive. The inconvinience is that it works differnetly depending whether u use ASCII or GUI interface. ASCII is more correct. I 'd like to ask maybe Solstice backup product is more preferable? Does it work with robot devices? Can admin chose some file systems and create schedule to backup on daily or weekly basis? I know that it costs 5 times cheaper than netbackup. But what about its features? can anyone advice smth. upon the matter?

It's a similar story with HP Omniback-II. Usually the CLI presents more flexibility than the GUI. Not that the GUI is that bad but you got to look sometimes in weird places of certain options.

I have no experience with Solstice backup but I know that all our Solaris boxes are being backed up using Netbackup. Why don't you script all your backups? In that way you don't need to bother with the GUI?

and who said we didn't script them? No GUI now because it shows just another contents of robot database often. Really interesting what advantages Solstice has? :)

Is there no specific refresh function in Netbackup to update the inventory that Netbackup has of your robot?

as far as i know inventory is being updated after each backup session (i mean /Netbackup/header image1 image2 image3). And also once a week bpexpdate is run to expire all tapes and generally refresh database). Maybe you mean just another specific functions?

Ah, I think I may have misunderstood your previous comments. Are we talking about the database -or- the contents of your robot library?

If it's the database: how can it be out of sync unless it needs some sort of repair?

Perhaps it's me who had misunderstood - the contents of robotic library that is the subject which netbackup can report in different ways sometimes. E.g. you know for sure that some volumes are absent physically but GUI tells you that they are still in place. Even ASCII in bpmedialist report after expiration tells that there are no media IDs present but when the script forces it to perform backup it finds all it needs. :)

Old Vens,

A similar problem exists for HP Omniback where it doesn't 'dynamically' track the most recent contents and status of its tape library. However this can be easily fixed by using barcode labels. I am not sure if you use these. Tape libraries come with a fast barcode reader functionality and it should be possible to force the tape library to refresh its contents using the barcode labels on the physical tapes from within Netbackup. A barcode scan only takes a couple of seconds even for tape libraries with more than 500 slots. With the result of the barcodes scan Omniback can be match the info with database records to know for sure which tapes are safe to use or not.

If you do NOT use barcode labels then the only way to validate the tape library contents is to scan the header information of each tape individually. That means loading, reading and unloading each tape from the library which can take hours! Not sure if this is also case for Netbackup.

Netbackup itself supports barcode labels but i guess our tape device doesn't do it. Maybe future upgrades allow us to solve it. Even without barcode we have no serious problems with backups although i tried to backup my Linux workstation and failed. I've got the message that evrth. OK but found no backup on the tape.
Solstice is native Sun Microsystems product , it should be worth using i think but cannot find details to compare with Netbackup. :)

How about asking your SUN agent?

It is the most curious thing :) When we were planning our SUN ES 5500 and having several discussions with Sun Moscow office (about server configaration, prices etc.) finally they created recommended specification. :) They also included NetBackup there ...

I think it's not only worthwhile checking out the strengths of Solstice Backup but also the future intentions of SUN with it. If SUN constantly puts the Veritas solution forward then it seems to me that their commitment to the in-house product is not very convincing.

Guess you are right :)