Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Restoring NDMP backups over the network (A DarrenDunham)

2008-01-23 17:59:55
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Restoring NDMP backups over the network (A DarrenDunham)
From: Jeff Cleverley <jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:39:45 -0700
I understand the way things are written to tape much better now and can see that we probably would not be able to restore a tape to a non-ndmp system such as a hpux server. 

The solution we are looking at would only be needed until the data retention period for existing backups expire.  We would keep NetBackup around during that time.  Once everything expires, the server and tape library would find other things to do. 

What I'm taking from this is that even if I want to restore back to a filer, unless the data is being read off of tape by a filer that understands its version of dump, restores won't work.  That means we will need to keep the tape library connected to a filer for restores until everything expires. 

Am I getting closer :-)

Jeff

Nick Majeran wrote:
Right, NetApp writes in dump, the Celerra will do either dump or tar,
and who knows, you may even find some vendors using cpio.

One important thing to remember is that, as the backup format for NDMP
is strictly platform dependant, so you can't restore your EMC NDMP
dumps to a NetApp or vise versa.  You also shouldn't try and restore
to a local disk, as this won't work pre-6.0, and is very, very slow
(if it works at all) post 6.0.

-- nick


  
On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 07:57:01PM -0700, Jeff Cleverley wrote:
    
1.  Are all NDMP backups classified as dumps, or should we still be able
to restore selected files to another location either on a filer or
another file system?  The backups are configured for the file system
level backups, but of type NDMP.
      
NDMP as used today doesn't specify a file format, but leaves it up to
the device.  For your purposes though, the answer is yes.  All NDMP
backups of a Network Appliance filer will use a dump serialization.
(Other devices can use very different formats).

    
2.  Are there any known gotchas that will either require us to connect
the library to the new filer or prevent us from doing a standard restore?
      
While the stream is a pretty standard netapp dump, NBU will write extra
information to the tape to identify it.  I don't think you can just hook
up an tape written via NBU, type 'restore' and expect it to read it
properly.  At a minimum, I'd think you'd have to forward the tape to the
correct file, then skip past the NBU header.  I'm not sure if you could
do that step again on later volumes if the image spans tapes.

This forum post talks about steps to use 'ufsrestore' on a Solaris
host.  I would assume similar steps would be required to use 'restore'
on a filer.

https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=21&thread.id=36270

--
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
         < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >
    
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-- 

Jeff Cleverley
Unix Systems Administrator
4380 Ziegler Road
Fort Collins, Colorado 80525
970-288-4611
jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com
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