Point-in-time directory recovery on Unix clients - useless?

[Bartacus]

Has anyone in here been able to successfully use TSMs point-in-time restore feature on Unix clients? I ran into my first P.I.T. request today and I'm not impressed. We were asked to do a restore for a certain directory on a Solaris Unix client today (eg /opt/bart).



The request: restore this folder, back dated to March 10th, 2005.



The problem: since the directory has been backed up daily, and files within it change frequently, the Unix date on the directory is always very recent. When you invoke TSMs P.I.T. feature from the GUI, you can't even select the directory for restoration since the directories date is much newer than the date selected in the P.I.T. setting, thus it is filtered out.



Now I'm still fairly new to TSM and am mostly self-taught, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here. What is the point of having this P.I.T. feature if you can't properly apply it to a directory structure?!?! Feel free to have a good laugh at my expense if this is a "TSM noob" problem. :grin:



Bart

 

[p007393]

Hi Bart,

sorry, but as usual this should be your selfmade problem. Well, obviously you may load backup copies iff (i.e. "if and only if") you had made a backup copy before. Let us say, you made this copy on a regular basis, e.g. daily. TSM server has associated a management class with this backup copies. Especially have a look at the default management class or that one you explicitly associated in the include/exclude definition table. The trick is: the management class itself does not give you a lot of information about certain essential values. However, the backup copygroup belonging to a management class does. Please have a look at it on your TSM server. The backup copygroup contains the information on how long a backup copy is to be stored or how long it is to be kept on the server.

For example, if the file you would like to restore changes every day, every day a new version of this file is copied to the TSM server. Let us say you (or your backup copygroup associated to the managementclass) only keep three versions of this file. Then, the TSM server expires every version of this file, that is older than three days. Exactly this circumstances makes it impossible for you to load the desired file older than three days. Well, just check your management classes and the appropriate copy groups. May be you would like to edit the settings. Then, do not forget to activate the manipulated policy set. By the way, do you know where to obtain the manuals?

Cheers

Michael

 

[Bartacus]

Hi Michael,



Thanks for the response. I have all the manuals here, and I do understand how TSMs management classes work. My problem is not the 3 version limit that we implemented. My problem is that the point-in-time filter filters out a directory that I KNOW has files in it that I can get back. Since the directory date stamp is updated daily in Unix, the P.I.T. features seems rather useless since it filters out the directory we'd like to recover because it has a new date. If I'm not using the P.I.T. filter (ie a standard restore), I can pick and choose individual files within this directory that are quite old. The files are there for restoring, but we wanted to do a P.I.T. since the directory contains thousands of files. This P.I.T. filter seems to filter out the directory based on the directories date stamp in Unix, and not filter it based on the files within it. Hope that clarifies what I was after. It seems to be a lost battle unless there is a setting I can change that modifies how the P.I.T. actually filters out files/directories. Logically, one would assume that if there are files in this directory that are dated previous to your P.I.T., you could restore them with this feature, yet you cannot because if the directories date stamp is very recent, the P.I.T. filter will not even allow you to select it for restoration, even though files exist with in that are much older.



Bart

 

[Jeroen]

I think this is only an issue with the GUI. Using the cli (dsmc) will give you the directories.

See http://msgs2.adsm.org/cgi-bin/get/adsm0103/207.html

 

[nbs03]

Bart,

Have you tried the command line?

dsmc restore '/opt/bart/*' -pitd=03/10/2005 -subdir=yes



- Ensure that you are root or own every file and directory when you run this command.



cheers

neil

 

[Bartacus]

Excellent! Thanks guys! I probably should have tried the command line first, but I made a rather stupid assumption that I was seeing a limitation in the point-in-time feature. This makes much more sense. Thanks again!



Bart