Restore Failover properties

The Restore Failover properties control how NetBackup performs automatic failover to a NetBackup media server. A failover server may be necessary if the regular media server is temporarily inaccessible to perform a restore operation.

The automatic failover does not require administrator intervention. By default, NetBackup does not perform automatic failover.

The Restore Failover properties apply to selected master servers.

The following situations describe examples of when to use the restore failover capability:

Two or more media servers share a robot and each has connected drives. When a restore is requested, one of the servers is temporarily inaccessible.
Two or more media servers have stand alone drives of the same type. When a restore is requested, one of the servers is temporarily inaccessible.

In these instances, inaccessible means that the connection between bprd on the master server and bptm on the media server (through bpcd) fails.

Possible reasons for the failure are as follows:

The media server is down.
The media server is up but bpcd does not respond. (For example, if the connection is refused or access is denied.)
The media server is up and bpcd is running, but bptm has problems. (For example, or bptm cannot find the required tape.)

The Media server column displays the NetBackup media servers that have failover protection for restores. The Failover restore server column displays the servers that provide the failover protection. NetBackup searches from top to bottom in the Failover restore server column until it finds another server that can perform the restore.

A NetBackup media server can appear only once in the Media server column but can be a failover server for multiple other media servers. The protected server and the failover server must both be in the same master and media server cluster.