need to restore from off site data when no primary volume info is available

[[email protected]]

Hello all,

I have a tale of sadness and woe. I was given the green-light to decommission an old TSM server 3+ years ago. All data that was to be kept was migrated to other servers and the old TSM server went to the happy beyond. The backup admin nightmare has hit and I now need to restore data from that server. I’ve been able to partially resurrect the old server (a zombie?) and I’ve identified offsite tapes with the data I need. (Don’t ask why those tapes still exist, suffice to say accounting preferred to pay the monthly storage fee rather than destroy the tapes) While the zombie server has information of the copy volumes, there is no information on the original primary volumes or stgpools. Thus I have no volumes or stgpools that I can run a restore command against or mark as destroyed to force a rebuild from the copy volumes.

Does anyone have a process to read in data from off-site copy volumes without primary volume information available? It’s a simple idea in concept not how TSM is designed to work.

Thanks!

 

[moon-buddy]

First of all. how did you restore the 'old' TSM server? Did you use the last known DB backup?

If you have used the last DB backup, and magically have the DR plan (assuming DRM was in use!), you can do the DR methodology.

Otherwise, I don't know of any utility to read data off a TSM backup tape especially if the data had been encrypted (which I hope it was not!).

You may want to ask IBM for help. Or, someone else in this forum has 'some toys' to read off data from un-encrypted TSM tapes.

 

[[email protected]]

moon-buddy,

Thanks for the quick reply. You're correct in your guess that my resurrected server was not done by a DB backup, thus the ugly situation I've eneded up with. I also agree with you that my only recourse is to do a data-dump of the offsite tapes. I posed the question more as a desperate gamble than any real hope <grin>. The hardest thing I'm truly facing is explaining to management how things work.

Thanks again!

 

[tsm_dude]

Not sure if you have a DB or not, but if primary is not in library, TSM will complain and also ask for the copy. We take some primaries out of library and when restore TSM
automatically goes for the copy tape. You could put the offsite tapes in library, login to client and kick off restore, but you need a DB for that.
So all im saying is you can restore a client directly without the primary if the copy is readwrite, you dont need to restore volumes.