Backup software with specific functionality

[Goid]

Looking for a backup product that has the ability to analyze a volume and know when files are legitimately deleted in a disaster recovery situation.

Consider this scenario. Full backup on Friday with incrementals running everyday. Say your array dies on Tuesday for whatever reason. So you go through the process of restoring from the full on friday and each subsequest incremental after that. You get your array to where you think it should be. But on Monday, you had a bunch of files that a user deleted that do not need to be there anymore, but are finding that these files were restored by the backup. So you are now presented with a bunch of files that do not need to be there, but are there because the backup program doesn't know they shouldn't be there. It just dumps data from tape to disk.

What I am looking for is a program that has the ability to know that a file was deleted, so when you are restoring, the backup compares what it has in it's database with what it sees on the volume. If the files were on a backup, but are not there now, then do not restore these files.

Any one know of software with this functionality. I am currently using ARCServe 11.5 to 12 and ARCServe support has verified that they do not have this functionality.

Thank you for any input on this.
Cheers!!

 

[chgwhat]

I know TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager )does this but does not do full backups.

dsmc restore will restore all files that existed during last backup, not the ones someone deleted the day before.

Also you can do a point in time with preview, to generate a list of files that were there before, and compare to what is there now.



Tony ... aka chgwhat

When in doubt,,, Power out...

 

[comtec17]

chgwhat is correct, TSM performs this function by using the versioning and deleted versions configurations. In order to properly do this, the only full backup TSM will ever do is the very first one, thereafter is incremental forever.

 

[ProbablyDown]

But you can employ colocation and active version stgpools in conjunction with tape reclaimation to ensure that you have a complete set of files on the fewest number of volumes. Archives can substitute full backups (like annuals or mthly) if you need to retain certain things long term, and tweaking the # of inactive (older) versions of files will address the shorter term retention data.

 

[LeeMason]

It's difficult to believe that someone would sell backup software (ARCserve or whatever) and not provide the functionality to properly restore files back to a known point (inc. deleting file that have actually been deleted). I used to work on OpenVMS (and still do) and the backup utility on this has always had this functionality (back to the late 1970's).

Anyway, I know that disk-to-disk backup software from Ahsay does this (and allows the restore of deleted files for a specific period - based on retention periods) and keeps multiple versions of backed up files to allow restores to specific dates. We use this software ourselves and it works very well in this respect.


Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com

 

[hobbes80]

many on-line backup software packages offer this functionality. The one I'm most familiar with is Asigra, which will only restore items on that server that were there as of the last backup. You can check a box that will allow you to restore the deleted items as well, if you would like.

So, if a user deletes a folder by accident, and another backup runs, you could specify just to restore the deleted folder.

In the scenario you describe where you want to restore to tuesday, you'd do one restore of "most recent generation of all files" and it would get you to that point. You could then cherry pick deleted files if need be.

 

[Martin999]

NetBackup will do this.

Martin