What to do after losing backup storage

@Ken_H , is there any parity on the drives so you can replace and rebuild it at that level, or is this not RAID, just a drive presented?

You could Aux Copy all of the data off, ensure the jobs are there, replace the disk, then Aux Copy it back (and promote the disk copy back to Primary).

That’s likely your easiest and cleanest method.

@Mike Struening, This is my secondary storage and all backups are configured to have a copy on both the primary and secondary media agents.  It sounds like all I’d need to do is re-run an aux copy from the primary media agent.  How would I ensure that all backups are fully replicated after the change?

Ken

Oh, even better!

Beyond normal restore testing after completion, you could (afterwards) set the retention on the current copy to Spool Copy.  This will only allow jobs to prune once they are fully copied over to all dependent copies (there’s no days or cycles count).

If the source copy clears out, then you’re good.  If any jobs remain, then the Aux didn’t complete (or there are other issues).

Of course, worth repeating that it pays to do some quick browsing/restore testing JUST to be sure!

@YYZ, the documentation for Move MountPath says “Do not move a mount path to another active mount path” so I’m not sure this will work for me.

That's correct. You cannot drop an existing mount path within another mount path. 

You would have to create new/empty folders

I tried a little experiment to move everything off M:.

1. Update M: to “Disable mount path for new data”
2. Went to Storage Policies > Email > Copy 2 > View > Jobs > Job 388543 > right-click > Delete job > erase and reuse media > OK
3. Right-click on the Commcell > All tasks > Data aging > immediate > OK
4. Back to Policies > Email > right-click > Aux Copy > OK > waited for job to finish
5. Client > Exchange Mailbox > right-click > View > Archive history > OK > highlight job 388543 > right-click > View Media > only shows the copy at my primary site.

So … the aux copy did not replace the backup I manually deleted on to a different drive.  That’s unfortunate.

@Mike Struening  I don’t see anything on the properties of Copy 1 in the storage policy for a “Spool Copy”.  I’m not sure where you’re getting that.

@Ken_H , I should have been more specific.  Spool Copy is a setting on the retention tab for any copy that has dependent Aux Copies.

This should help:

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/119069_spool_copies.html

Let me know if you have more questions!

I may be missing something, though for Spool copy you need to let the job Aux copy over before it gets deleted.

The Enabling Spool Copy page says:

1. ensure that the storage policy copy is assigned as a source to another active synchronous copy.

2. From the CommCell Browser, go to Policies > Storage Policies ><Storage Policy>.

3. Right-click the storage policy copy that was assigned as a source, and click Properties.

4. In the Copy Properties dialog box, click the Retention tab, click Spool Copy (No Retention), and then click OK.

But when I go to Copy 1 > Properties > Retention tab, there is no Spool Copy option.  Sigh.  If I had a dollar for every time the user interface didn’t match the documentation, I would be a very rich man.

Thanks everyone for your help.  It seems clear that this is so far outside the normal bounds of what can be done with CommVault that I’ve opened ticket 211217-687 to get some assistance.

Ken

If it’s not there, then maybe there’s no Synchronous Aux Copy yet?  I’m darn curious now!

Once you have an answer, let us know.  The main issue is of course your concern, though the not-appearing-spool-option is curious.

Ignoring the two most recent aux copy jobs that I ran manually today, you can see that aux copies run every 8 hours starting at 2:00 AM.

So … I misunderstood the instructions for Moving a Mount Path which say:

• The move mount path operation overwrites the destination mount path. Therefore, ensure that the destination mount path is an empty folder.

I mistakenly thought this meant I couldn’t move to one of the existing drives but it turns out that all I needed was to create a new folder.  I created L:\MP4 and was able to move everything off M: to that new folder so I’m in a good position to change the configuration on the M: drive.  Thanks everyone.  @YYZ was correct and I’ll mark their reply as the solution.

Ken