[Bacula-users] Trouble recovering the catalog with bscan

Dear list,

I have had a little trouble which I mostly caused myself. :) It's another 
boring tale of "I lost my catalog".

(Prologue: I'm backing up to a "disk" storage (daily) and a "tape" storage 
(weekly). And the physical disk ran full so I tried to purge and 
remove "volumes" (files) there. Unfortunately I did it wrong and thus 
couldn't restore from disk any more. So I tried to restore from "tape" - 
my safety net. Unfortunately the jobs there had been pruned automatically 
already.)

So I thought I'd recover the catalog by "bscan"ning the two tapes that I 
know were used for the last full backup. This is where my story begins:

Attempt 1:

I scanned the two tapes seperately with commands like:

        bscan  -V ait01 -c /etc/bacula/bacula-sd.conf -P mypassword \
                -h my.server.ip -v -s -m /dev/nst0

        bscan  -V ait05 -c /etc/bacula/bacula-sd.conf -P mypassword \
                -h my.server.ip -v -s -m /dev/nst0

I ended up with a job in "list jobs" but with termination code "E". So I 
couldn't restore from it.

Attempt 2:

I read the documentation again and found that I can restore two volumes at 
once with the "pipe" syntax so I tried:

        bscan -V 'ait01|ait05' -c /etc/bacula/bacula-sd.conf -P mypassword \
                -h my.server.ip -v -s -m /dev/nst0

and ran types "ait01" and "ait05" through. Again I ended up with a job with 
code "E".

Attempt 3:

I went into the database (PostgreSQL, ASCII encoding) and changed the job 
status to "T" manually and tried to restore with option 5 ("Select the 
most recent backup for a client"). The restore failed due to:

        "No Full backup before 2009-03-24 13:54:38 found."

Attempt 4:

Interestingly it tried to use my disk-based job instead of the desired 
tape-based job. So I used option 11 ("Enter a list of directories to 
restore for found JobIds"), chose the job ID manually and finally 
recovered my long-lost file.


So I wonder what I did wrong. Of course I wouldn't want to use "bscan" as 
an everyday tool and should take better care of my catalog and volumes. 
But as a last resort I'd like to have a reliable catalog recovery.

Comments welcome. Thanks.

Cheers
 Christoph

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