NDMP - Large Restore Request Questions

[buster99]

Hello, I wanted to see if anyone could help me find the best way to perform a massive NDMP restore. We just got a request to restore data from an NDMP node directory that the business side thought was being archived but not deleted off the system. Turns out the data in the directories was being purged after 15 days, so now I need to go back from mid-January 2016 to January 2015. At the least, I would like to get back data from the last quarter of 2015.
This FS has a daily INCR backup schedule along with a quarterly FULL backup schedule which last ran in November.

A little info...

TSM V7.1.4.0
AIX 7100-03-04-1441

Is it possible to perform an "automated" NDMP restore over multiple dates ? We do use TOC for the NDMP backups.
Tape library has over 5000 tapes in it but I know we will have to load a lot of tapes as the job runs...can I find out which tapes will be needed before running the restore and get them back in there first ?

So far, I haven't found anything that would help me avoid doing an NDMP restore from each day from January 2016 and back. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you

 

[marclant]

Not really, the only option is to do a point-in-time restore, which will bring back the filesystem to what it was on the day you select. If you want to restore to the end of the first quarter of 2015, you could use -pitdate=03/31/2015. You can check: HELP RESTORE NODE

There's no preview on the restore command, so you cannot get a list of tapes needed, best you can do is get the list of tapes that this node owns: q nodedata node_name

 

[buster99]

Marclant, Thank you for the reply and info. Luckily, after explaining the scope of this request to the business side, they have decided that they will just request smaller data restore requests as needed, along with reviewing the retention policies on some of their data on the network. Thank again.

 

[tony2018]

A couple of things to remember when someone is asking for a large restores:

Do they want to restore to a different NFS share? Does your NAS have enough storage to provide? If they want to restore to the same dir, are they prepare to have any current data overwritten?

The sad part about NDMP restores via TSM is that you can't search for files using special characters, you have to view the entire ToC and select what files are needed, created a filelist, and run it. I hope someone can prove me wrong about that.