Problem Recovering Netbackup Catalog

Are you still having this problem Alberto? I'm curious as to why you would get an invalid header error. Has symantec upport been able to solve this?

Hi Jeff,

thank you for your reply.

after trying to do a DR restore as described in my first post, we have had no chance to try one more time.

as soon as we'll have another chance to do a DR test, i want to do as follow:

• i've find out (and i want to try it out when we will do another test) that i can also use this parameter:

          ALT_RESTORE_COPY_NUMBER

          to specify to use a copy number different from the primary one. i want to see if it can help.

• use a different backup catalog to restore (even if there was NO evidence that the one used last time was in any case corrupted)
• if neither of these options will solve our problem, and if we'll have the very same error, i'll open a case with Symantec support.

i'll post here when i'll have some news, 

regards,

Alberto

Alberto

There is a posssible issue for you here so I will explain my thinking about what may be happening ...

The first part of the catalog completes its restore successfully - this is the images part - it does this by reading the disk images, not by reading anything from the catalog as it doesn't have one!

Once that completes it comes to do the second phase of the restore which is the NetBackup databases - but by this time is does have all of the catalog images restored so uses those as the reference for the restore - however they now refer completely to the old system so calls the wrong files / ID's / media server etc.

So it may be that you have to do the following:

1. select to restore images only first during your catalog recovery

2. once that completes do a nbcatsync so that all images and fragements are correct

3. Restore the databases - you can use bprecover -r - nbdb to do that.

This tech note pretty much says the same thing:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH127922

Hope this helps

still in trouble here:

1) i've restored Netbackup catalog images (using bprecover -wizard -copy 3): everything fine!

images were successfully restored

2) i've used nbcatsync -sync_dr_file <full path to dr file>

it changed the disk media id

3) trying bprecover -r -nbdb or bprecover -wizard -copy 3 (using R option) fail because it still want to use the PROD appliance:

This might be way over-simplifying your issue, but have you tried restarting EMM?

restarted netbackup services / rebooted the whole server (just to be sure), but nothing changed:

Try commenting ur primary disk media line in DR file.

Hi All,

we decided to try another DR test, following a more specific Symantec technote:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO32925

as in the other test, we managed to have our backup images restored on local filesystem.

The steps we’ve done are:

1.      nbcatsync -sync_dr_file <disaster recovery file>

2.      bprecover -wizard -copy 3 (we selected P option, to recover the PARTIAL catalog including only the NetBackup catalog image)

we restored almost 65GB data in ~ 1h

3.      nbcatsync -backupid image_id (To fix the disk media IDs in the image headers)

i’ve read here:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH160521

that nbcatsync is not recommended in our case (in DR, Netbackup Master Clone can just see N5000)

after ~18hrs, nbcatsync if far far away from finishing its job (i can see it progressing in a log file under admin directory)

we are not sure that (when nbcatsync will finish its job) we can restore NBDB, and then start restore our data.

But even if that would be possible, this is a really slow solution, obviously we cannot think to wait days before starting to restore our data.

Moreover, under /usr/openv/netbackup/db/images we have 107, while our DR goal is to protect just 10 clients.

So, 2 questions:

1.      Is it a way to prune the NBDB catalog in advance (that is to say, before restoring it in DR site), so that we will be able to just restore a subset of data related with just the clients we need to protect?

(of course, when i’ve written about “pruning the catalog”, i was referring to the catalog that is to be restored in DR site, PROD catalog has to remain untouched!)

2.      If we make a NBDB online backup like this (on Netbackup Master PROD):

nbdb_backup -dbn NBDB -online /root/backup/backup_1 -truncate_tlog

and then restore it to Netbackup Master Clone, is it still required to To fix the disk media IDs in the image headers using nbcatsync?

Is there something else we can do?

regards,

Alberto

after almost 48hrs, nbcatsync exited with this error:

[root@nbms01 INFO_DR]# nbcatsync -backupid nbms01.client.it_1343473367
nbcatsync: failure occurred while locating image: prderdb01.client.it_1338862941
nbcatsync: EXIT STATUS 114
nbcatsync: unimplemented error code 114 (114)
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root
[root@nbms01 INFO_DR]#