Networker group setup and naming convention

Question

Hi all, At this moment, we have over 380 groups defined in our NetWorker environment. Which is way too much for 500+ clients that we have. Most of the groups run between 7PM and and 6AM, and have an interval of 24h. Now we have group names which gives a bit information about the customer, the os of the clients in that group, the level, the schedule, ... And we want to make things a bit simpler now. In the end, the only thing a group does, is provinding a start-time and an interval. So we want to keep it this simple, and we were thinking on creating groups with names like: GR1900_INT24 GR1930_INT24 GR2000_INT24 ... GR0600_INT24 And maybe some groups with an interval of 4 hours (which are only a few groups): GR0000_INT04 GR0100_INT04 GR0200_INT04 GR0300_INT04 But then again, we have several pools (3 different datadomains, VTL, physical tape, other backup-to-disk), and the only restriction of a pool we use, is the group selection. So we should also generate groups with the pool name in it's naming convention: GR1900_INT24_DD1backup GR1900_INT24_DD2backup GR1900_INT24_DD3backup GR1900_INT24_VTL01backup ... If we would do that, we still get a lot of groups. Of course, most of the groups go to DD1backup, so we should only create a few for those other pools. But then an other thing. The retentions.... For our datadomains (NFS mounts - not VTL) and other backup-to-disk devices it's not an issue. If a saveset is expired in a adv_file it will clean up this expired save set. But for our VTL, and physical tape, if we would write data with long retentions and short retentions to the same tape, we get a lot of expired save sets on non-recycleble (virtual)tapes. Since we have a very specific schedule for most of our clients (daily incremental with retention a, weekly full with retention b, monthly full with retention c, and sometimes even a quarterly or yearly backup with retention d or e), it would make sense to have groups for VTL and tape for each kind of retention. But then we would have even more groups..... How are you all handeling with this kind of problems? And how is your naming convention for your networker groups? Kind regards

ble1 · Answer

I used pools based on retention or data type (I separate db, fs,archive logs and metadata backups - those are standard backups using same retention which is short-term; long term goes to PTL).

group naming convetion is [SID]_[SAP | ORA | SQL]_[FS | DB | ARCH | TLOG]_[ACC | DEV | EDU | PRD | TST]_[site identifier]_[remote | local]_counterid

Not sure why do you have so many groups, but it souns as your environment could use some tweaking.

NetWorker

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