On Tuesday 03 March 2009 8:34:00 am Thomas wrote:
> so, last week i wrote a small perl script that uses bcopy to clone every
> volume from the FULL pool, that was written within the last 3 days, to 
offsite tapes.
[snip]

> all bcopy's finished successful.
> but my restore tests failed.

[snip]

> 1.) the bextract from the bcopied tapes shows errors on domino/notes 
datafiles :
> 
> bextract JobId 0: -rw-r--r--   1 2110     2110    3117678592 2009-02-27 
22:38:34  /stage/backup/notes/data/mail/horst.nsf
> 02-Mär 19:47 bextract JobId 0: Error: attribs.c:421 File size of restored 
file /stage/backup/notes/data/mail/horst.nsf not correct. Original 
3117678592, restored 10722668181.
> bextract JobId 0: -rw-r--r--   1 2110     2110    1298399232 2009-02-27 
22:50:32  /stage/backup/notes/data/mail/heinz.nsf
> 02-Mär 19:55 bextract JobId 0: Error: attribs.c:421 File size of restored 
file /stage/backup/notes/data/mail/heinz.nsf not correct. Original 
1298399232, restored 7057145936.

This smells like a sparse file (*) issue - it's possible the .nsf files 
allocate more than is actually in there, which can cause problems for 
backup/restore utilities.  When you back these files up originally, 
is "sparse=yes" specified in the FileSet resource?

(*) - Sparse files are those where there is only data written to a portion of 
the file which is allocated in the file system.  The O/S will return 0's for 
the "empty" sections even though those sections are not physically on the 
disk.  When restoring a file that is sparse, if the program isn't aware of 
it, it'll write out the sparse areas as 0's, greatly increasing the real size 
of the file.

http://www.bacula.org/en/rel-manual/Configuring_Director.html#SECTION001470000000000000000

> nearly 50% of the restored .nsf shows this error.
> and no: the files does not change their size while the backup runs.
> if i restore with bextract from the original tape and the unchanged 
booststrap all files are restored without errors.
> is there something special with these nsf files?
> i also saw this problem with directly backuped vmware disk images (.vmdk).

VMWare disk images are sparse as well.

Brian


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