Restoring from old tapes - catalog completes but no server info in set

[Owen_Brady]

I am attempting to get some data off some old tapes from 2009. I have Inventoried and Catalogged the tapes in Backup Exec 2012, and the Catalog job has successfully completed, showing that there is 114GB of data on the tape. However when I look at the tape in the storage view there are no Backup Sets!

I looked at the Job Log for the Catalog job and it is showing that there are 6 backup sets on the tape... but there seems to be no server name for the backup sets (see attached image). Is there any way I can just manually get this data off the tapes? It is obviously there, I could even see the Catalog job listing file names as it ran!

Thanks for any help.

[CraigV]

Hi Owen,

What does it show when you accesss the tape directly?

Thanks!

[Owen_Brady]

Hi Craig,

How do I access the tape directly? I have gone to the Storage tab and looked at the tape there, where it also shows no backup sets.

[pkh]

In the Backup and Restore tab, do you see any new server names? If so, then these would be the servers whose backup sets are contained in the tapes.

[CraigV]

...and the date range is correct?

Thanks!

[VJware]

Another option to find out more information is using Cattools.

Post running the catalog off the old tapes, new catalog files would have been generated in the Catalogs directory. You could try using Cattools to dump the contents to a text file.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH198906

[Owen_Brady]

Hi pkh,

No new server names.

To make sure I wasn't just not seeing the sets, I stopped all the BE services and renamed the Catalogs folder, then restarted the services and BE. Then I ran the catalog again. No matter how far into the past I put the date range I can't see any backup sets.

[Owen_Brady]

Hi VJWare,

Thanks for this, by dumping the catalogs I can see what files are on the tape.

Interestingly enough, the catalogs have been placed in the incompatible folder under Catalogs. When I look at the xml files for them they have no server listed under Machine. Is it possible to edit the xml to give the sets a Machine and then put them back in the regular Catalogs folder to have BE recognise them?

[Owen_Brady]

Doing this makes the backup set show up for the tape in the Storage tab, but it doesn't show up for the server in the Backup and Restore tab. I assume there is more that needs to be done to link a backup set to a server, does anyone know where I might look?

[VJware]

Are there any errors/warnings relating to catalogs or odbc under the event viewer ?

What type of data was backed up ? Was this non-Windows data ?
 

[Owen_Brady]

I do have an ODBC access error which says "Possible ... unsuccessful access to catalog index in database" from earlier. I don't see it occurring again, even if I stop and restart all the BE and BE SQL services.

The data is old files from a Windows server.

[VJware]

Which version of BE was used to backup this data ?

And as you can see the backup sets under the Storage tab (but not other Backup & Restore), do you have an option to right-click these backup sets and choose Duplicate ? if yes, would you duplicate few backup sets to disk and check.

[Owen_Brady]

Couldn't tell you what version unfortunately as it was before I was employed here. It might even be a version of Brighstor ArcServe given we still have the CDs for it in a filing cabinet here.

[Owen_Brady]

Attempted the duplication, which failed with "The DC2000 cartridge has was formatted with an unrecognized format."

[VJware · Accepted solution]

Okay, so these tapes were probably written with a different software. Usually, the same .mtf format is used, but this could explain as to why the catalogs moved to an incompatible folder.

If the ArcServe backups were made with certain settings such as compression/encryption, then these data will not be restored by BE..

Enabling debugging during cataloging may tell us which software or version of BE was used. It may be worthwhile to try restoring using native Windows backup or BE 2010 (however, this may be difficult to test).

[Owen_Brady]

I'm looking at two options at the moment: install ArcServe or try to use tapes from when I think we switched over to BE and hope the data hung around long enough to be on those tapes. I'll probably try the latter first.

I'll mark this one resolved because at this point I don't think BE2012 is going to be able to restore these old tapes.

Thanks for all your help!