Recover data from ADSM / TSM without ADSM/TSM

[Miadams]

Hi,



i am an absolute newbie regarding tsm and adsm but now i'm in deep sh*t



At a customers site I have an IBM VisualInfo installation, probably using ADSM or TSM (Operating System is OS/2 so it should be ADSM I think)



Today the customer called and said his HD crashed. The computer cannot be booted or restored. Now I have a HP Surestore optical Jukebox and lots of MO disks but no clue how to restore the data. Is ADSM using some kind of structured filesystem or is it just writing file after file and saving the pointers in the DB (that would be soooooo~~~ bad )



as you can probably imagine, no one ever cared about data security because an external company always did some maintenance, but now that company is bankrupt and, as always, nobody knows anything about the system :sad



Again, my question: is there any way to recover the data from the MO media (HP MO Jukebox maybe with IBM firmware and MO drives from HP / IBM (Sony SMO****))



Thank you very much in advance



Michael

 

[tom.s]

Michael,



My friend, TSM......is just writing file after file and saving the pointers in the DB .



This sounds like a strange system though from the point of view of recovery (but I guess you're way ahead on that realization). Normally you would expect the database to be regularly written off to tape and potentially taken away. I guess it could be getting written to your optical library....? If it is TSM/ADSM and there are no database backups, you are pretty much done.



Having said all of this, are you sure that it wasn't simply using the OS/2's built in backup utility? Given that this is OS/2 perhaps it isn't surprising, but this would be a very old, very out of support installation of ADSM (v2?). I've no idea where you would download the code from.



If you want to approach this as a purely technical problem, I would go to HP for drivers for their Jukebox, then try reading from the volumes in it and see what comes back. If it turns out to be ADSM, you will need installation media and a backup of the database to restore from. Until you have a system to restore to though and have worked out for sure what was used to back it up, this is all kind of hypothetical.



Incidentally, I guess this is a silly question.... but I take it you can't read anything from the HD?



Why ever did this fine company go bust, by the way?



Tom

 

[Miadams]

>Why ever did this fine company go bust, by the way?



Guess why Customers don't like to hear that their data isn't secure and they, especially in germany, really like to sue! The products they sold were not really good either and they were really expensive.



OK! Tomorrow (or better: in 8 hours, we have 0:01 in germany right now) I will see the installation and I will try to recover the data. HP does not offer any drivers for the Jukebox but that's not really a problem, I control several jukeboxes with a java interface for mtx (http://mtx.sourceforge.net) very good tool btw. :grin:



So reading the data *should* not be the problem. Interpreting the data (e.g. separating the files) may be a problem. So lets hope IBM VisualInfo *does* use some kind of OS/2 backup utility.



Usually VisualInfo uses, just like ContentManager OnDemand, TSM / ADSM. Maybe this is just when running on AIX... ah... probably i have to call someone at IBM



Thank you very much for your quick reply



Michael



[EDIT]



anyway, how do i recognize ADSM media? is there any tag which says "hello i am adsm" or "hello i am os/2 backup software" ? :grin:



Well... I guess that the only thing I can do is try to get someone from IBM who knows VisualInfo (EDMSuite)

 

[tom.s]

Michael,



I'll have a dig around and see if I can find any examples of a ADSM tape dump. However, even so, you would still have a problem. Am I right in thinking that ADSM (if it was used)was just being used as a repository for VisualInfo data? If VisualInfo/ADSM works anything like CommonStore, a working TSM installation is not sufficient. I think it is also the case with VisualInfo that there would be some sort of database (DB2, Oracle....) in use by the applciation without which, even if you recover ADSM, you still just have a big bunch of objects.



Of course it is still possible that the server was backing itself up to this repository.... I guess.



The only info that I can find that is at all illuminating is in the Redbook sg245159 which explains VisualInfo/ADSM recovery for NT and AIX.



Sooner or later, you will certainly have to call IBM on this one.



Tom

 

[Miadams]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font class="pn-sub">Quote:</font><HR></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT class="pn-sub"><BLOCKQUOTE>Michael,



I'll have a dig around and see if I can find any examples of a ADSM tape dump. However, even so, you would still have a problem. Am I right in thinking that ADSM (if it was used)was just being used as a repository for VisualInfo data? If VisualInfo/ADSM works anything like CommonStore, a working TSM installation is not sufficient. I think it is also the case with VisualInfo that there would be some sort of database (DB2, Oracle....) in use by the applciation without which, even if you recover ADSM, you still just have a big bunch of objects.



Of course it is still possible that the server was backing itself up to this repository.... I guess.



The only info that I can find that is at all illuminating is in the Redbook sg245159 which explains VisualInfo/ADSM recovery for NT and AIX.



Sooner or later, you will certainly have to call IBM on this one.



Tom</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR></TD></TR></TABLE>



Thank you very much Tom, but I managed to restore the Harddrive, and there was no ADSM or TSM just some damn backup tool :evil:



The good thing is: It is way easier to restore the system this way :lol:



Thank you very much for your (very, very useful) help!

 

[tom.s]

Michael,



I'm glad it all turned out OK.