It is very critical to create an effective policy and schedule to protect the data in the NetBackup. We’ll discuss the basic policy types and configuration of policy attributes.
Here we’ll discuss in detail about NetBackup policy types and attributes, adding clients to a policy and creating backup selections. Lets also talk about how the NetBackup relates to a backup plan.
There are certain things we need to decide before creating a policy which is a backup plan:
- What kinds of clients need to be backed up?
- What type of storage you want to use for the backup?
- How often you wants to backup your clients data?
- For how many days/weeks/months/years you want to retain your backup images?
- How long your backups run?
- How long is your backup window?
- How much of data needs to backed up?
- When do you want your backups to run?
- Where do you want to save your backed up data?
- When do you want to restore your data?
Most of the Backups will have below four options to define the backup jobs:
Attributes
The Attribute option decides what and where the data will be backed up. The Policy type talks about what kind of data will be backed up like windows, linux etc.
There are two types of basic policy:
- Standard – Unix, Linux, Mac OS X or Novell NetWare clients
- MS-Windows – Windows 2003, 2008, 2012, XP, Vista, or Windows 7 or Windows 8 clients
You have the option to choose data classification for the backup, storage for for the backup. If you have a disk based storage you can choose from drop down of “Policy storage” and if have a tape based storage then you can choose “Policy volume pool” and the volume pool is not related to disk based storage.
You can limit the backup job per policy, choose the job priority, and select the media owner. Snapshot backup can also be configured and opt for retain snapshot for Instant Recovery or SLP management. It also give the option to enable off-host backup.
You can also enable or disable Compression, Encryption, collect true image restore information and enable optimized backup of Windows deduplication volume etc. MS-Windows option is used to backup all type of supported windows servers. Standard option is used to backup Unix, Linux, Mac or Novell NetWare servers.
Schedule
In the Schedule tab you have the option to schedule the backup policy as per your choice. You can also create a new schedule, give a name to the backup job, select the type of backup like Full backup / Differential incremental / Cumulative incremental / user backup or archive backup. You can also choose the backup frequency and other related options.
Start window tab in Schedule allows to setup the start time and end time for all the scheduled backup in a day. It decides when a backup can start however once a backup is started it can end post the completion and may exceed the end window and backup end window does not affect it.
For example, you have a Tape library with 4 tape drives and if there are 5 backups scheduled to run on a particular day and the backup start time is 9:00 am and end time is 9:00 pm then if four backups out of 5 start before 9:00 pm and if the 5th job could not start since there was no free tape drive storage then the 5th backup will not run and will report error – 196.
Exclude option allows you to remove any particular day or date when you don’t want to run a backup job. It can be a recurring day in week or month as well. So if you select any day or date in the bottom windows it will show a red x mark in the top window.
Clients
In the Clients tab you can select the added clients or add new clients, delete existing clients. You can have one or more clients in a backup policy.
Backup Selections
Backup selections options allows you to create a selection of files and folders and drives to include in the backup jobs. A new backup selection selection can also be added in policy. It also gives the option to rename the selection list and move up and down any files or folders to prioritize them.
There are multiple ways of creating a policy in NetBackup:
The very first option to create a backup policy is the policy creation wizard which does go through very simple process and creates the policy in an easy way.
Administration console allows to create a policy in a simple method and also to modify an existing policy. Since the Policy configuration wizard is a straight away configuration most of the time we use administration console to edit or modify the backup job policy to ensure it is created as per our need.
You can also create a backup policy using the command-line interface and command is bppolicynew
Also check – How to configure NetBackup storage unit groups
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