Best practices: Universal shares

NetBackup's universal shares feature provides open-source data protection without the need for a backup agent or API. The feature was designed for use with Oracle, MS-SQL, and other relational database types so that a database analyst (DBA) can "dump" a database backup to a specific network share that is mounted on the database client via NFS or SMB. At that point, the "dump" can then be protected with a specialized NetBackup policy. This approach provides the DBA the flexibility to manage their own backups while also realizing the existing protection and optimization benefits of other NetBackup features like MSDP.

Space efficiency is achieved by storing this data directly into an existing NetBackup-based deduplication pool. Any data that is stored in a universal share is automatically placed in MSDP storage where it is deduplicated automatically. This data is then deduplicated against all other data that was previously ingested into the media server's MSDP pool. Because a typical MSDP storage server stores data across a broad scope of data types, the universal share offers significant deduplication efficiency.

After the data is protected and indexed within the NetBackup catalog, the data can be duplicated or replicated as part of any activity that is supported by a NetBackup storage lifecycle policy (SLP).