"Suppose that my Data Protector system crashed, how do I know on which tape the last version of my Internal Database is stored on?"
Well, there you have the problem in a nutshell. I am going to make a couple of suggestions that I have made to a lot of folks
- I recommend that you create a Backup specification ONLY for the Internal Database. This is really a Best Practice, since you don't want to be backing up the IDB while other backups are going on, keeping the IDB busy. Schedule the IDB backup for a quiet time, when nothing else is running
- I recommend that you create a seperate media pool JUST for the IDB backup, and in the backup specification, in the Destination tab for the device, you assign the IDB backup to use this pool
- I recommend that you format ONLY one media into this pool, since you have a limited amount of slots, and that you format the media from a slot number that you will remember, say, slot 1 for example. In this way, media in slot 1 will only be used for an IDB backup. If you have a catastrophic IDB failure, you can rebuild the IDB (a topic for another discussion), create a temporary logical device, and import ONLY the media in slot 1 (again, using my example), and you should be able to restore the IDB from there
No matter what slot you choose, the key thing is to be able to physically identify the media used for the IDB backup, and use that for a restore
Regarding protection on IDB backups, as soon as you run any backup after doing the IDB backup, the IDB backup becomes obsolete. It makes no sense to me to protect IDB backups for a long time. I would say that protecting the IDB backup for about 5-7 days would be sufficient, since, if you restore a IDB backup, you would have to import any media used subsequent to the IDB backup
There is a file named 'media.log' that can be used to find out what media was used for backups, and it includes the name of the Backup specification and the session ID number. Without knowing what version of DP or what teh OS-type and version of teh cell manager, I can't be more specific, but, you should be able to do a search for this file