Find specific tape that contains file to be restored
Hey guys,
I have a pretty large and ancient NetBackup 7.5 archive, which has about 20k pieces of media associated with it, and has all of our permanent archives in it.
I have to restore several thousand files from this system, which span several years of the archive.
Because we multiplexed our archives, the backup images that contain these files span a lot of tapes.
When we kick off restores, NBU will present a list of all the tapes needed to restore the entire backup image, at the top of the restore log, which can be many 10s of tapes, even though we are only looking to restore a single file from that backup image.
Because of this, we end up loading a ton of extraneous tapes that are not needed to restore the single file.
What I am looking for is a way to identify what specific tape contains the file in question being restored.
NBU knows what this is, as it will go directly to the tape needed, load it, restore the file, then complete the job, ignoring all of the other tapes that were loaded.
I am wondering how I can get to that information, so I can load just the one tape that contains the single file I am looking for. I know Device Manager will sit there asking for a specific tape it is looking for, so that would work - however, since I need to restore several thousand individual files, I cannot sit there and wait for Device Manager to pop it's request, then go load the tape, then wait for the next request from Device Manager. I need to be able to find and pre-load these tapes into the robot, so the jobs just up and go.
Any ideas on this one?
Thanks a ton in advance!