As Len said, it works fine in general with the caveat about DAR.   How 
much of a problem that is depends on the skill of your backup staff.  It 
is very easy when a call comes in to a helpdesk to 'restore folder xyz' to 
just do it the same as any other non-NDMP restore.   This is a bad idea, 
as if you select a folder to restore DAR is switched off and the restore 
typically takes as long as the backup - for some of ours that could be 18 
hours.  Tying up drives doing restores that are required for the next 
backup causes knock-on effects.

Provided the operators are trained to know which are NDMP restores, and 
then only ever select files to restore, it is OK.

If you need more than 1024 files back you can break it into several 
restores.   It is possible to use bplist to get the list of files, treat 
it to prefix the path lengths to each line, and feed it to bprestore as a 
file with the 'file list' in it.  More thought up front pays dividends 
later.

Also - not all appliances are equal in terms of performance.   NetApp are 
OK but you cannot adjust the tape block size above 64k, so they don't get 
full performance from any LTO drive.   EMC Celerra since DART 5.3 are 
better, not good though - but there is a lot you can tune now.  Others I 
don't know about.

William D L Brown




"Bhangui, Sandeep - BLS CTR" <Bhangui.Sandeep AT bls DOT gov> 
Sent by: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
02-Feb-2006 01:57
 
To
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
cc

Subject
[Veritas-bu] Netbackup issues with NDMP restores






Hi
                    We backup tons of data on the filer we have using 
Veritas Netbackup using NDMP. Our NDMP backups are for all volumes coming 
from the filer which are NFS mounted on UNIX hosts primarily used for 
oracle and weblogic.
 
I have read lot of posts on the forum that "NDMP restore sucks" can 
someone please elaborate on this is what is the real issue/concern. Can we 
not restore a single file or directory if recovered and does the whole 
volume has to be restored back for this??? 
 
We have not had a situation where we have to restore from tapes but after 
reading so many posts on the forum regarding "NDMP restores" I am  little 
concerned. And all reviopus posts on this seem to say that the NDMP 
restore sucks and follks recommend to do NFS mount backups from the server 
for easy restore.
 
Can someone throw some light on this.
 
Thanks
Sandeep