FSA Placeholders

[Telegram_Sam]

We are using EV 9.0.2 and i have an issue in recreating FSA Placeholders.

The original Fileserver (Server A) was using EV FSA to archive data 2 years or more old.

This server suffered a hardware failure and was put out to rest due to its age.  All data on it belonged to an old project approaching closure.

We now would like to recreate the original placeholder on an Archive server (Server B).

I thought, no problem, let's use FSA Utility. When I looked at FSA Utility I found that i cannot recreate the placeholders on a new server without the source being up and active.  This is the command I tried...

fsautility -m -s \\server A\d$\serverdata\01 Business Reports -d \\Server B\serverdata\01 Business Reports -l 0

the error I get is "Invalid server Name Server A

Has anyone got any advice on how to do this?

Thanks,  

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

well "FSAUtility -m" is a move right?
So it needs the other server to be only to actually move them, just like if you wanted to copy and paste items in windows explorer, you need the source to be available in order to put it to the target.

You should probably use "FSAUtility -c" which is to recreate the shortcuts instead

[Rob_Brenner]

I would advise to step carefully here and to study carefully what you intend to do.

Often rushed decisions can lead to complications which can be difficult to resolve.

Let's consider the easiest steps:

would you be able to rename the new server using the old server name?

If that is possible, as long as you have new volumes which could be used to represent the original volumes in the old server A that were being managed by FSA, you could use FSAUtility to recreate the PH.

You would obviously have to use FSAUtility to re-create the original ArchivePoints, and here is another warning not to use any other methods when recreating existing ArchivePoints - only use FSAUtility for this purpose.

If you would have to rename the file server B back as the original Server A needs to continue existing in the network this will not be the best approach.

If server A is not available and will not be back ont he network, I presume you could just rename server B to server A.

It would probably be a good idea to test this in VM first

[Telegram_Sam]

Using FSAUtility to regreat the Archive Points, does this only recreate the Folder structure to the Archive Point?  I would like to test recreating just one folder of placeholders onto a VM named "Server A" rather then recreating the whole archive which is very large.

To recreate the Archive Points I would use "FSAUtility -a -s UNC_path -l 0"

I can only do this if the original server (Server A) is up and online.  So do I have to create VM with a load of disk space free and recreate the Archive points and then migrate them to the new location?

Thanks  

[Rob_Brenner]

Yes, and no, for your test case using a VM environment assuming you have created a VM system where the file server name is the same as the legacy Server A, all you need to do is to re-allocate the Partitions that were configured as archiving targets with the corresponding shares which were added in the VAC as volume targets.

For just recreating the Archive Points with FSAUtility, and here let me stress that you should always use FSAUtility only, you will need minimal disk space.

FSAUtility –a will only recreate the Archive Points under that particular Volume path (share). Obviously if you had an Archive Point at the top level or higher folder structure, but you also had other Archive Points further down within the folder structure, these will also be recreated, so the folder structure should reflect the path down to the level where all Archive Points would be recreated.

[Rob_Brenner]

If you would also test the recreation of the Placeholders, you can limit this test by specifying a low level path under the Archive point so that it only recreates the Placeholders for that low level subfolder path, therefore requiring little disk space.

While you test this process, make sure that the original Archiving Task that used to process the Server A is stopped / disabled until you complete the tests. This would ensure the Archiving process does not attempt to process the Server A, which you would need to make available in the network.

[Rob_Brenner]

Keep in mind that in order to migrate the Archive to a new file server, the Placeholders should exist so they get recreated at destination.

If you are going to migrate the Archive to a new file server, say ‘Server  B’, which is managed by the same EV server, and ideally by the same Vault Store, then you can consider using the –pm option from FSAUtility which will only update the FolderPath, volume and Archive records in the database. All the archived items would remain with the same Id references. What would change is the path in the database which would then point to the new file server. The –pm or Placeholder Migration, is more efficient in terms of performance when compared to –m.