Consider the following precautions when you back up catalogs:

• Do not use the scheduling or the backup methods from other vendors.

• Do not rely on user backups or regularly scheduled backups. If you use these methods and the disk fails, the catalogs are lost and you may not be able to recover any data.

• If you use media servers, manually alter the NetBackup catalog configuration to include the catalogs on the media servers.

• Back up your catalogs often. If these files are lost, you lose information about backups and the configuration changes that were made between the time of the last NetBackup catalog backup and the time that the disk crash occurred.

• Do not use methods other than NTFS compression to compress the catalogs or NetBackup may not be able to read them.

• Never manually compress the catalogs. If you compress them manually, NetBackup may not be able to read them with its standard mechanism, the bprecover command.

• Keep a hardcopy record of the media IDs where you store the NetBackup catalog backups, or configure the email global attribute. The email global attribute causes NetBackup to send an email that indicates the status of each catalog backup and the media ID that was used. You then can print the email or save it on a disk other than the one that has the catalogs.

• If you back up your catalogs to disk (not recommended), always back up to a different disk than where the catalogs reside. If you back up to the same disk and that disk fails, you also lose the catalog backups. The recovery is much more difficult. Ensure that the disk has enough space for the catalogs or it fills up and backups fail.

• The NetBackup binary catalog is more sensitive to the location of the catalog. To store your catalog on a remote file system can create critical performance issues for catalog backups. NetBackup does not support saving catalogs to a remote file system such as NFS or CIFS.