We just did a massive restore of a large filesystem on an important
server and had a question on how to speed up the operation.  We did it,
but it took a lot longer than it should have.  My challenge was to
restore this large filesystem quickly with the most current files on it,
but needing to get this restore off of a full that was 4 days old, and 3
differential incremental backups.

Is there a way to quickly get the most current files restored without
having to manually choose the most current version of each file in each
directory?  

I somewhat know the answer to this, and that would be to do a True Image
backup--but I understand this would be a big speed hit.  But do many of
you realistically use the True Image functionality for *every* class? 
Admitedly, we do use True Image backup on our large file server that has
thousands of little user files, but doing it for every server doesn't
seem viable.

Or, would it have been quicker to restore everything from the full, wait
til it completed, then restore completely each incremental, choosing the
'overwrite' option?  The limitation of this would be that it would
restore files that have been deleted.   

I just came from using Legato NetWorker, and admitedly I think that
their restore GUI/functionality is better.  But I think its the *only*
part of their software I liked better.  Otherwise I'm a happy NetBackup
camper.


Regards,

RCA
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Ryan C. Anderson           United Defense L.P. 
UNIX Administrator         http://www.udlp.com/ 
(desk) 763.572.6684        (pager) 612.235.9936 
ryan_anderson AT udlp DOT com     Mail stop M313 
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