Great story! Restoring data is overrated anyway. =P
-Jonathan
________________________________
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu on behalf of Bobby
Williams
Sent: Sat 1/26/2008 8:39 AM
To: 'veritas-bu'
Subject: [Veritas-bu] For those of you backing up millions of files....
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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