Server migration problems!

[kyle_krenz]

I have a pretty serious question i need answerd. Yesterday I did a server migration to upgrade our old backup server. I did the copying of catalogs from the old server to the new one, used the copy settings to media servers tool under tools menus and that all works. I was able to copy all the jobs over to the new server no problem and backups are running fine now.

But when i goto do a restore for a user here, it cant find the media. So i look in the media tab and check offline media to see if all of our old media tapes are in there. And there is NOTHING. I dont understand what went wrong, ive dont a server migration before and it copied all that over. But for some reason none of the old cataloged tapes are not there. IS there any solution you might know to get our old tapes back in the offline media so we can do restores without recataloging all of our tapes which isnt an option with the volume of tapes we have and amount of time it would take. Thanks

[ray_littlefie1]

One method:

1.) Make a backup copy of your existing database using BEUtility.exe (dump database)
2.) Rename your current bedb.bak file on your new server. (found in ...\veritas\backupexec\nt\data)
3.) Copy from your old server the bedb.bak file
4.) Using BEUtility, Recover the old database (Recover Database -> drop existing database and reload from backup)


You will likely need to delete and then re-scan your tape devices, as the bedb database contains both media and device information from the old configuration...

[kyle_krenz]

Ok, so i dumped the database in beutility. I then rename the bedb file to something else? Would copying the database file to another location be good to save it? Next i would use the copy feature in beutility correct and navigate to the database file on the old backup server and the log files also which is says. Then click ok to copy over existing database file on new server?

Then when thats done use the recover and it should be good? I just want to clarify so im doing everything correctly.

[ray_littlefie1]

I suggested renaming your current bedb.bak file to something else, so that you could copy the old server's bedb.bak file to the same location- If you want to place the old servers bedb.bak file in C:\temp or something that's fine.

No, you wouldn't use BEutilites copy/apply configuration utility to point to the old server for the bedb.bak file- it's looking for a *.cfg file. You need to physically copy the bedb.bak file over.

Then recover the old databse.

[kyle_krenz]

Well i did everything you said and the old tape media still isnt showing up in the offline media. Could this be because that im using an existing sql server to also run backup exec in? This is the only diffrence i can see between the two setups.

[ray_littlefie1]

So you're saying you where using a SQL instance for the BEDB rather than MSDE? That would make a big difference.

Sorry, I have no experience with retrieving the media database from a SQL instance of BEDB.

good luck.

[kyle_krenz]

Ya, the reason why we had backup exec use the existing sql server was because this sever that backupexec is on right now is our IIS server. Our old backup sever was starting to have major issues and i had to do a emergancy migration to our IIS server which was the only one that could possibly be used that wouldnt affect many things. But my coworker told me not to install another instance of sql on the server do to the fact it might mess something up in the main sql database.

This is the only thing i can think of that could be causeing this. If someone could confirm my suspicions it would help alot. I guess ill have to for now catalog each tape that ther restores say they need to get the restore to work till someone here can help me find the solution.

[Ken_Putnam]

After copying the catalog files to the new server, did you force BackupExec to re-index?

See http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/272886.htm

[kyle_krenz]

yes i did, twice now to make sure.

[ray_littlefie1]

Yeah, re-indexing only checks links between the image files and the media database. Your problem is that you are missing some of your media database. Somewhere in the documentation there is a warning about when you copy configurations it only copies media in active media sets So some offline media or media not used for a long time does not migrate over using that method.

You need to export the bedb database from your SQL instance and recover it. Now, you just need someone who has done it before to tell you how.

[Ken_Putnam]

For v7 and v8, that was the key to migrating catalogs, but v9 and v10 seem to have lots of problems with this

With everything that you have tried, you are probably down to paying for an incident, since the Symantec Reps here on the Forums have never addressed this, even though it has come up repeatedly.

[kyle_krenz]

Well i found the solution to my problem. What i did to fix this was in BEutility i just used the copy database feature. Selected the database and ldf file from the old server and copied it onto the new server. It did change alot of things like the devices and names of the media sets that weir on the old server, but that was easy enough to change back.

So the solution to this problem if old media isnt showing up in the offline media, use BEutility and copy the old database to the new server if you are sharing a sql server database with backupexec.