In regard to: [Networker] Question regarding NetWorker's recovery strategy,...:

I'm not sure how to phrase this question, but my experience with NW has
always been host based. In other words, if you want to recover a file
from some host from long ago, and that host no longer exists, then you
have to clown around a little bit to recover it to another current host.
In other words, having the physical tape, a drive that can read it, the
NetWorker software and knowing the ssid for the save set is not enough.
It seems there was always some mischief with having to create an NSR
client resource having that same client name and clientid in order to
recover it, maybe even to another host? Is that right? I'm not talking
about a browsable recovery. For that, I believe what I mentioned is the
case. Instead, I'm only talking about a save set recovery, so I may have
my information wrong there?

Pretty much all true, yes.

Here's my question: I want to be able to back up specific directories on a given client, and I don't care about the client.

This doesn't fit NetWorker's security model at all, so you're going to
have a difficult time here.

Think about it: in the vast majority of the cases, admins actually *do*
care about what host the data is on.  /var/lib/mysql on hostA isn't
generally going to be the same as /var/lib/mysql on hostB, and unless the
NetWorker admin specifically configures it, hostB should not be able to
recover hostA's data.

In other words, even though NW will record the client name in the media database, is there a way to recover the save set (save set recover, not browsable recover) without having to know anything about the client that backed it up (particularly in cases where the client is long gone) or having to play any games with making NW think there's such a client or named resource or having to know the clientid?

I've never tried to do this (again, you're really off the beaten path
here) but it's possible that you could skip the client creation process
entirely and just use uasm, possibly in combination with dd or some other
command.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
edu
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