To take advantage of basic disk staging requires that the NetBackup administrator understand the life expectancy of the image on the Stage I storage unit.

The size and use of the file system of the Stage I storage unit directly affects the life expectancy of the image before it is copied to the Stage II storage unit. Symantec recommends a dedicated file system for each disk staging storage unit.

Consider the following example: A NetBackup administrator wants incremental backups to be available on disk for one week.

Incremental backups are done Monday through Saturday, with full backups done on Sunday. The full backups are sent directly to tape and do not use basic disk staging.

Each night's total incremental backups are sent to a disk staging storage unit and average from 300 MB to 500 MB. Occasionally a backup is 700 MB. Each following day the relocation schedule runs on the disk staging storage unit and copies the previous night's incremental backups to the final destination, a Media Manager (tape) storage unit.