Restore a file from a 'Quick Erased' tape Arcserve 9

[ceil32]

I have Arcserve 9.0 running on Windows 2003 SP2

I did a 'Quick Erase' yesterday on the previous weeks tapes.

Backup job ran fine last night.

I need to restore a file from Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this week.

When I Inventory or Mount, it shows all tapes apart from last night as empty

Is there a way of restoring a file from the tapes I 'Quick erased'?

Thanks..

 

[eclidad]

I'll offer the little information I know. First let me say that I don't know what the quick erase does to the database. If that info isn't there anymore and it's not on your backup then the task gets harder. I suppose you could always restore the whole media. That assumes you've got enough space to do it.

Now comes the issue of dealing with the info that gets erased. Back when we were using Arcserve 9.0 I was curious about how the backup was structured on the tape. I put a backup into one of our linux systems and read chunks of data. I believe they were 32K blocks. I mucked around with the first(?) block and changed the tape name, serial number, and so on. I wrote this back to the tape. I couldn't do much with it in Arcserve but all the new data I created was visible.

I suspect you've got a bit of tinkering to do but I wouldn't give up hope of getting some files off the backup.

- Joel

 

[Cyklops]

when erasing a tape (quick or long) ARCserve overwrites the existing tape header with a new (NULL) header which technically wipes out the access to the data. In other words: there is no way to restore any data of it using ARCserve. The data itself however is still on the tape cartridge (except for a long erase which overwrites all data on the cartride). You might be able to restore some data out of it but you have to find a specialised company who can provide this for you. It will not be cheap though.

regards

 

[davidmichel]

Quick Erase does over write the head so in fact all the data is there just not accessible via ARCserve. Any good data recovery service should have no trouble getting the data back.

Long Erase just for the record uses the actual SCSI Erase command which tells the drive to erase the tape. The drive will position the tape to the beginning of media and then erase the tape until it reaches the end of the tape.