On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 05:11:40PM -0400, George Sinclair wrote:
> Why is that sometimes sometimes when you're recovering data, NW rebuilds 
> the directories in the path, and sometimes it just dumps the final 
> directory without rebuilding the parent directories? I've seen this 
> happen with save set recover, recover and nwrecover, too.



> For example, if I back up /data/dir1/dir2, and then I recover it as:
> 
> recover -s serve -d /relocate_dir -S ssid
> 
> I would expect to get /relocate_dir/data/dir1/dir2
> 
> Well, sometimes I do, but other times I might just get
> 
> /relocate_dir/dir2

>From the 'recover' man page the -d option suggests to look at the
relocate section.

$ man recover
[...]
relocate [ directory ]
      Change the target recover location to directory. If directory is
      not specified then the user will be prompted for a destination
      directory. Relative paths are interpreted relative to the current
      working directory within the recover program. The recovered files
      will be placed into this directory, which will be created if
      necessary. When files from multiple directories are being
      recovered, they will be placed below this directory with a path
      relative to the first common parent of all the files to be
      recovered. For example, if /usr/include/sys/errno.h and
      /usr/include/stdio.h are being recovered, and the relocation
      directory is set to /tmp, then the first common parent of these
      two files is include, so the recovered files will be named
      /tmp/sys/errno.h, and /tmp/stdio.h.

This says that it depends on the contents of the set of files being
recovered.

> recover -s server -d /relocate_dir -S ssid1 -S ssid2 -S ssid3
> 
> where ssid1=/data/old/2001; ssid2=/data/old/files/a.txt; 
> ssid3=/data/old/files/b.txt
> 
> Here's what I got:
> 
> /relocate_dir/2001
> /relocate_dir/files/a.txt
> /relocate_dir/files/b.txt
>
> 1. Why does it not rebuild 'data/old' ???

>From the above, because data/old is the first common parent of all
files, so the paths created are relative to it.

> However, when I recovered these in two steps as:
> 
> recover -s server -d /relocate_dir -S ssid2 -S ssid3
> recover -s server -d /relocate_dir -S ssid1
> 
> I instead get this:
> 
> /relocate_dir/a.txt
> /relocate_dir/b.txt
> /relocate_dir/2001
> 
> 2. Why would it drop the 'files' directory?

Because each job is checked for the necessary files independently.  That
means that any single file recovered will always be placed directly in
the recovery folder with no additional directory structure created.

I've never looked at this quite this closely before, but your example
appears to support the documentation.  I'm pretty sure that NetBackup
does a similar process during restores as well.

-- 
Darren

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