We have warned, begged, pleaded, and threatened, but some application owners want to keep everything forever.

I have a system with a file system with over 29 million files.  Of course no one can afford advanced client.  No one wants a raw partition backup because they may want that 1 file…   You have heard the excuses.

Well, the storm hit.  I am moving a server to another data center and had to move the SAN volumes via tape.

(Don't start telling me a better way of moving this stuff, that is not the point of this email and I have been suggesting ways for a while).

I could not fire off a restore of the entire file system.  It would just stay in the queue.  I started seeing what I could fire off.  I started selecting some subdirectories and was able to restore.

There were only 21,300 individual subdirectories, so clicking a few in the GUI was NOT an option.

I did a bplist and got the subdir names.  Using split, I split the subdir names into groups of 50.  Gave me 425 file lists.

I ran a script to brute force the restores.  Uh-oh.  1 tape with the data on it.  Not enough memory to calculate the restore list for 425 restore jobs concurrently.

There is a "-w" switch on the bprestore command.  I now know what it is for.  If you are scripting, it prevents the next restore from firing off until the previous restore is finished.  I had to go with it to keep everything from timing out in the queue and not knowing what had run and what had not.  I did include the "-L" to keep up with what had / had not fired.

Data is going back and the restore will be successful.  Howerver, someone promised that the system would be online for testing 10 hours after it was installed.

I had told them several times this week that the full backup took 35 hours, so don't expect a quick restore.

Point of the email is that "yes, we can back up millions of files without paying for advanced client, but we can't restore the data per your RTO/SLA".

Bobby Williams
2205 Peterson Drive
Chattanooga, Tennessee  37421
423-296-8200

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