jasun's blog

Veritas NetBackup issues

For some reason Veritas NetBackup has been ignoring the rules that I have set in place to exclude certain files such as logs from the daily incremental backup schedule. Over 200 megabytes of compressed data was being backed up on a daily basis which was way too much considering a backup of most of that data is was not required.

As far as I'm aware the configuration allows files to be excluded regardless of path & just by name but that does not appear to have been working. It looks like the full path must be supplied and then any wildcards can be used if required.

I've updated the configuration to include the full paths for the exclusions, which now falls in line with the full paths which were setup in the include file. It makes sense, but could create a lot more work when creating large backup policies of the same exclusions of the same files in different locations in the directory structure.

Another important thing to note is that when including a number of directories so that the directories are not lost when a full system restore is done, it would be a good idea to exlude the files in the directory like so:

/test/test/*

Instead of excluding the directory itself also, which would be the case if the configuration was as below:

/test/test/

It might not be an issue, but if a number of applications require certain directories to be present and they are not, more time might be experienced where the system or applications are down because of missing directories. Hopefully that should solve the issue, but I'll have to wait and see the results of the backup tonight, in the logs tomorrow. If not, it'll back to the documentation & Google for me!