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Cataloging old tapes

tape_monkey1
Level 3

I have a large quantity (200+) of LTO5 tapes that are from a Backup Exec 2012 install that no longer exists here.  We now using BE 15 and I have a requirement to locate some data on these old tapes.  Unfortunatley, there are no good records of what is on the tapes, other than I know that these are flat file server backups (nothing special like SQL/Exchange/AD).  I'd like to avoid cataloging the tapes in full as it is very time consuming.  All I really need is the backup set information on them, specifically the resource backed up and when the backup was created.  Once I find the resource I need from the right timeframe, I can do an in-depth catalog.  I had to disable the setting to use the storage-based catalogs as that was causign our Backup Exec server to crash randomly (https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000019938).

 

Is there any way to configure tape cataloging to only capture the high-level information rather than the full tape contents or does anyone have a good idea on how to proceed?  Any help would be appreciated!

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Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Nope

As you probably don't know which tapes contain sets that span from one tape to another either I'd suggest turn off the request all media in a sequence setting when running the catalog jobs as you might get errors for tapes you have not yet inventoried if you don't

 

We did sort of get round your problem (once) a long time ago - we managed to find an old BEDB.bak on one of the tapes, restored that and used SQL queries to dig into the job histories . Using the results of those queries to find a tape containing an older BEDB.bak to restore and repeated until we got back to the time frame of interest - however we had enough records to give us the start of the chain of possible BEDB.bak files - in your case in might be needle in  haystack time as you would have to know that you were backing up this file and then need to find a BEDB.bak from newer then the date of interest to work backwards from (and then you would probably need a lot of help to dig into the content as well)

Mind you finding a tape from slightly newer than the date of interest that has a backup of the catalogs folder (or a backup of the Data folder for the job logs) on it might be an easier option as I think you can then do a text search against the XML files (for server names) if you restore either folder - and then look at the tape labels that are also in the XML files that match your servernames. (the XML files are text editor  readable)

Good luck....

 

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2 REPLIES 2

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Nope

As you probably don't know which tapes contain sets that span from one tape to another either I'd suggest turn off the request all media in a sequence setting when running the catalog jobs as you might get errors for tapes you have not yet inventoried if you don't

 

We did sort of get round your problem (once) a long time ago - we managed to find an old BEDB.bak on one of the tapes, restored that and used SQL queries to dig into the job histories . Using the results of those queries to find a tape containing an older BEDB.bak to restore and repeated until we got back to the time frame of interest - however we had enough records to give us the start of the chain of possible BEDB.bak files - in your case in might be needle in  haystack time as you would have to know that you were backing up this file and then need to find a BEDB.bak from newer then the date of interest to work backwards from (and then you would probably need a lot of help to dig into the content as well)

Mind you finding a tape from slightly newer than the date of interest that has a backup of the catalogs folder (or a backup of the Data folder for the job logs) on it might be an easier option as I think you can then do a text search against the XML files (for server names) if you restore either folder - and then look at the tape labels that are also in the XML files that match your servernames. (the XML files are text editor  readable)

Good luck....

 

tape_monkey1
Level 3

Colin,

 

Not what iI was hoping to hear, but a good suggestion.  I was able to do just that.  I found an old copy of the previous Backup Exec database and was able to sift through and find the media set info and allocation date.  It looks like it is able to get me "close enough".  I was able to narrow down from 200-ish tapes down to 30 - which I am working on cataloging now. 

 

Thanks for the suggestion!