Networker 7.4 media tracking

Try command : mminfo

http://www.ipnom.com/Legato-NetWorker-Commands/mminfo.html

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Just goto Networker Management Console

Click on Media --> Click on Volumes------- This is the location where you will get all your required information.

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Any chance to obtain the information through command line?

The provided link will give you the required arguments to be used.

Otherwise, if you need report to be extracted, then through GUI also you

can extract the same.

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Hi,

We're actually doing some of these, so maybe I can help here:

a. barcode label of tape used, retention periond and pool (assuming you want to list those back-ups since yesterday):

mminfo -av -q 'savetime>=yesterday' -r 'barcode,pool,volretent'

b. when a particular tape is used for the first time and the last time it was used (assuming volume name is VOLUME1):

mminfo -av -q 'volume=VOLUME1' -r 'volume,olabel,volaccess'

c. when a tape should be inserted back and the number of time it was used

- when to insert back will depend on your volume retention (see a.)

- number of times it was used might be difficult as NW tracks differently (please correct me if I'm wrong here), so you might want to try the parameters volaccess, labeled or mounts (see description on the reference guide mentioned in one of the post above).

d. when a tape will expire (content) and the location of each tape (assuming you mean saveset for contents):

mminfo -av -q 'volume=VOLUME1' -r 'name,ssretent,location'

Hope this helps.

All the information can be found from the command line requested here, as stated previously it just depends upon what exactly you need to report as for instance volaccess would change if the volume was mounted for any reason.

As for using this method to move tapes around from location to location you must remember that if there are full backups on a tape and they have dependent incremental backups NetWorker will not mark the tape or saveset as recyclable even though the retention period is passed (as they are still required to facilitate a restore). This is important as you may return tapes to the jukebox which cannot be used for backups and will not be automatically relabelled by NetWorker.

Also if these tapes were taken out of the jukebox and were not full they are valid to use - so backups will be appended to the volume and the volume retention increased. Best practice when exporting/importing tapes from the jukebox is to mark the volume as full during the process (this can also be automated via script or batch file as well as import/export).

Regards,

Bill Mason

Here is what you are looking for I think:

a) mminfo -q volume=V00002 -r volume,barcode,pool,volretent

b) mminfo -q volume=V00002 -r volume,olabel,volaccess

c) mminfo -q volume=V00002 -r volume,volretent,mounts,recycled

d) mminfo -q volume=V00002 -r volume,volretent,location

These are the commands for one particular volume.  To get these values for all volumes, you can use for example:

mminfo -av -r volume,volretent,mounts,recycled

You can look in the documentation previously indicated for detailed information on what exactly each of these columns shows.

Also, using simply 'mminfo -m' gives useful volume information.

-Bobby

I didn't see Roose's update before answering - I think we basically recommend the same stuff but just one comment for (d), be careful of using 'ssretent' as a means of judging when a tape will expire.  The 'ssretent' value corresponds to the latest retention date of all instances of a saveset.  Some of these instances (clones) could be on other volumes.  It is the 'clretent' value that corresponds to the retention time of the instance of the saveset on one particular volume.  The 'volretent' value is equal to the latest of all 'clretent' values for that volume.

-Bobby

I agree with Bobby on the ssretent here...

By the way, one thing I noticed with volaccess value is that whenever you re-label your volume to another pool, the value will change to the first time you re-labeled that volume to the new pool. So, I don't think that Networker does keep a record when a volume was really first used on your system. Again, this is how what I have observed so far on our system, so please correct me if this is incorrect.

Roose, I think you're getting a little mixed up in the column definitions:

olabel - when the volume was labelled for the first time

labeled - the most recent time the volume was labelled (or re-labelled)

volaccess - last time volume was accessed for read or write

It is the olabel value that shouldn't change.  I haven't tested this though. Are you seeing this value changing?

-Bobby

Bobby, you're correct... I mistaken it with the time that we were getting the "Duplicate volume" error and Networker was not able to automatically recycle the volumes. We had to delete the index and media entry for those affected volumes, thus when we relabel the tapes, the olabel value was changed. But if relabeling only, olabel stays.