I noticed sometime ago -- guess it's no surprise to anyone else -- that
if you backup a pathname that is actually a symbolic link then NetWorker
will appear to be backing up the data and will in fact report that it
has done so, but you'll be in for a rude awakening when you later
attempt to recover the data.

Case in point. We had a saveset ('/home/username/Backups/fname') that
was listed on a particular clone tape. I tried to recover it using
'recover -s server -S ssid/cloneid', and it loaded the tape, forwarded
to the proper point on the tape but then said 0 file(s) recovered. Hmmm,
I thought. Must be a bad clone saveset, never mind the fact that mminfo
reported it as just fine. I then tried again and again with other
savesets. Same problem. I was beginning to think that maybe the entire
clone tape was bad or possibly the recover command could was somehow
trying to browse back to a point that no longer existed in the index.
Not possible, though, as I was specifying the ssid.

It finally dawned on me that on the client in question, the pathname:
/home -> /raid/home. Unfortunately, I never backed up
/raid/home/username/Backups/fname, so most likely even the original
saveset is likewise bogus. This is no big deal because all the newer
savesets and clones do specify the real pathname. I realized this
sometime ago, and changed it, but today I was just testing and playing
around and forgot about this.

Has anyone else had this problem or been burned by this before? What is
NetWorker doing when it backs up a sym link? I mean, if I have say 30 GB
of data living under say /home/foo and /home is a symbolic link to
/raid/home and I backup /home/foo it's gonna grind on that beast for
just as long as it would have if I had specified the real path. I've
seen this before, and I have to ask myself just what and the heck is
NetWorker really doing? We all know it can't recover it when you try to
-- I tried -- so what's in the saveset that's reported on the volume if
it can't recover it?

George

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