Mark,

Patience is indeed a virtue - it took a good while (an hour or so), but
all of a sudden it sprung to life, the directories appeared and the data
started chugging its way back to the client - *phew*!

Should have thought of this really - it's a skill to be cool, calm,
collected and patient when you have angry managers looking over your
shoulder and wanting to know now why it isn't working. The only
indication I observed that something was going on was that the 'Total
Buffer Requests', as seen in the 'q db f=d' output, was taking a big
hit. 

In any case, moving on from here, an hour to restore a single user's
directory structure (of less than a handful of MB or so) isn't what the
business are expecting, so I'll take a look at how to speed up this
directory scanning procedure for the future.

We live and learn - thanks for the help.

Rgds,

David McClelland


-----Original Message-----
From: Stapleton, Mark [mailto:mark.stapleton AT BERBEE DOT COM] 
Sent: 30 April 2004 18:18
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Really strange - unable to restore directories...


From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
David McClelland
>On this client, there is a *big* SAN filesystem, storing lots of user 
>profiles...
>
>Upon attempting to restore (point in time to a couple of days ago) from

>any of the user directories downwards (e.g. 
>\\myclient\g$\users\profiles\user.name\ ) all I get is "ANS1247I
Waiting
>for files from server". The client sits there, apparently waiting, and 
>although the session is still visible on the TSM server, there's no 
>traffic between client and server. The server doesn't seem to be doing
>*anything* at all - it is a server dedicated to this client, and is 
>otherwise, as far as I can tell, fully functional. I've left the client

>'waiting' for a good long while with no response whatsoever.
>
>Now, if I try to restore a file from within one of those directories, 
>the restore is instantaneous (large diskpool and caching enabled) and 
>successful.

What's happening (while nothing *appears* to be happening) is that TSM
is scanning the directory structure for g:\users\profiles. Once the scan
is complete, the restore will run in two chunks--rebuilding the
directory structure, and restoring the files. 

How long is long enough to finish the directory scan? It depends on the
directory environment and the speed of hardware. For a large drive on a
file server (2 million + files)--4-6 hours is not uncommon. 

When you restore one file, the only directory scanning that is done is
that scanning sufficient to rebuild enough directory structure to
restore the single file.

We've had numerous discussions in this list about how to avoid that long
wait while directory structures are rebuilt. Look in your client manual
about directory management classes (DIRMC) and directory structures
backed up to disk.

--
Mark Stapleton


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