help with importing expired backups 1

[enormousson]

Hi,

We are using NBU 4.5 on windows 2003 with a HP 20/700 tape library.
We need to do a full restore of backed-up data from a full backup and subsequent differrential incremental backups.
Unfortunately some of the older incremental backups have expired (due to unsuccessful full backups), so I believe i need to reimport them into the NBU catalogue database.
I am aware of the import procedure but I have no idea what the media-id or the backup-id's are for the backups I need to import so I am not sure how to find them.

Can anyone advise on how to find these expired backup images? Unfortunately our logs were also set to expire after 1 month, so I cannot use these...

The only idea I have had so far would be to reinstall NBU on another machine and import an old catalogue, to see if it has logs in that will allow me to see the backup jobs made on a particular date, but I am hoping there is a simpler solution.

thanks in advance
ivan

 

[MaineDCAdmin]

Check out bpimport.
There are two phases to importing media - Phase I and Phase II. Phase I MUST be completed before attempting Phase II.


-create_db_info (Phase I)
This creates the phase one information for the catalog. YOU WILL NEED TO USE -id WITH THE SWITCH


-id (Pase I or Phase II)
If you know the media ID you can imnport by media ID.



Phase II

-client
If you know the specific name of the client you wish to import

-s , -e if you know the start date and end date. Start date and end date can be combined with -client



There are several other switches to preview what you are about to import or restore. Check the NetBackup Commands reference Guide for more information about switches and bpimport.

 

[Vela]

How long since the incrementals would've been expired? If they were overwritten there is no chance for importing them.

we had to do this once. Basically one of the contractors was able to write a program that would load tapes and read the header files.

You could expirement with MT commands to read the tape's.
Each header might look like this-->"This is a BP backup tape header- (client name)"

 

[Vela]

Luckily alot of our tapes were sent offsite and not overwritten.

We even had a "special" firmware delivered to us so that we could read past the EOF header on the tapes. Netbackup writes this EOF on the header and usually you can't read past it.

 

[enormousson]

Thanks all,

I don't think any of the tapes were overwritten, so the import procedure is fine. In the end I had to just read all the tapes in to try and find all the relevant backup job ids. As we use 700 tapes i wanted a way of finding which media to use before I had to look at a whole bunch of them, but the long road worked in the end.

ivan

 

[Vela]

How many tapes did you have to import? If you have no idea what tapes were used, how did you know which ones to import? Did you guess lucky or what?

 

[enormousson]

it actually wasn't too bad. I used the 'last accessed' date of the tapes, to decide which groups of tapes could possibly hold the missing incremental backups I was looking for. This ended up being about 25 tapes, which completed their phase 1 import fairly quickly. I also didn't realise that this stage of the import told me exactly which backups were on the tape and when they were performed, so i didnt need the specific backup id's to then do a phase 2 import on the backups I needed.

 

[Vela]

phase 1 is pretty quick depending on how much data the tape contains.


Ryan