Determining File Location Prior to a restore

[PierreK]

Does anyone know how to determine the physical location (meaning volume) of a backed up file without actually restoring the file? We have both our backup pools and copy pools on tape, and to test our disaster recovery procedures, I want to find out which copy tapes would be needed to restore a single file from a specific node (NODE1, file C:/TEST.TXT)

Knowing which copy tapes are required to restore this file would save a lot of unnecessary handing of the rest of the tapes in the copy pool.



Thanks.

 

[heada]

First, you would need to mark all the existing primary pool volumes as destroyed (I would suggest you do this on a test system or a copy of your prod) and then perform the restore with a "preview=yes" option. It will list the volumes needed to perform the restore in the act-log.



Another way (which would require more work) would be to find out when the file was last backed up (should be listed in the GUI during the restore) and then query all the copy tapes that were last written to on that day (assuming you make a backup of your primary pool every day) It will be on one of those tapes. For example, if you knew the backup happened during the night of 07/15/2005 and you run the backup stgpool command in the morning, I would run a query like "select volume_name from volumes where stgpool_name='{CopyPool}' and last_write_date=07/16/2005"



-Aaron

 

[PierreK]

As far as I know, the "preview" option isn't supported for the RESTORE command.

If it was, I could use it to find the volumes in the backup stgpool, and then use a RESTORE VOLUME admin command with PREVIEW=YES to find the associated COPYPOOL volumes.

If you are able to preview your data set restores, please let me know how.



Thanks.