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  1. Home
  3. Veritas NetBackup™ Deduplication Guide
  5. Configuring deduplication
  7. About protecting the MSDP catalog
  9. About the MSDP catalog backup policy
Veritas NetBackup™ Deduplication Guide

About the MSDP catalog backup policy

Veritas recommends that you protect the MSDP catalog by backing it up. (A NetBackup catalog backup does not include the MSDP catalog.) The NetBackup Deduplication Catalog Policy Administration and Catalog Disaster Recovery utility (the drcontrol utility) configures a backup policy for the MSDP catalog. The policy also includes other important MSDP configuration information.

The MSDP catalog backups provide the second tier of catalog protection. The catalog backups are available if the shadow copies are not available or corrupt.

The following are the attributes for the catalog backup policy that the drcontrol utility creates:

Schedule

Weekly Full Backup and daily Differential Incremental Backup.

Backup window

6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

Retention

2 weeks

Backup selection

The following are the default catalog paths.

UNIX:

/database_path/databases/catalogshadow
/storage_path/etc
/database_path/databases/spa
/storage_path/var
/usr/openv/lib/ost-plugins/pd.conf
/usr/openv/lib/ost-plugins/mtstrm.conf
/database_path/databases/datacheck

Additional catalog paths are backed up if using a Cloud Catalyst storage server:

/msdpc/storage/databases/catalog/__info__.2
/msdpc/storage/databases/catalog/2
/msdpc/storage/data/.dataconverted
/msdpc/storage/data/.format
/msdpc/storage/data/.gcnf
/msdpc/storage/data/.identity
/msdpc/storage/data/.srcmap
/msdpc/cache/etc
/msdpc/cache/fsdb
/msdpc/cache/userdata/proc/cloud.lsu

Windows:

									database_path\databases\catalogshadow
									storage_path\etc
									storage_path\var
									install_path\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\ost-plugins\pd.conf
									install_path\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\ost-plugins\mtstrm.conf
									database_path\databases\spa
									database_path\databases\datacheck

By default, NetBackup uses the same path for the storage and the catalog; the database_path and the storage_path are the same. If you configure a separate path for the deduplication database, the paths are different. Regardless, the drcontrol utility captures the correct paths for the catalog backup selections.

You should consider the following items carefully before you configure an MSDP catalog backup:

  • Do not use the Media Server Deduplication Pool as the destination for the catalog backups. Recovery of the MSDP catalog from its Media Server Deduplication Pool is impossible.

  • Use a storage unit that is attached to a NetBackup host other than the MSDP storage server.

  • Use a separate MSDP catalog backup policy for each MSDP storage server.

    The drcontrol utility does not verify that the backup selections are the same for multiple storage servers. If the backup policy includes more than one MSDP storage server, the backup selection is the union of the backup selections for each host.

  • You cannot use one policy to protect MSDP storage servers on both UNIX hosts and Windows hosts.

    UNIX MSDP storage servers require a Standard backup policy and Windows MSDP storage servers require an MS-Windows policy.

See Configuring an MSDP catalog backup.

See Updating an MSDP catalog backup policy.

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Changing the MSDP shadow catalog path

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