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Some placeholders corrupt post fsautility migration from file server to CIFS?

RhoSysAdmin
Level 5

I recently migrated a large amount of placeholders from my Windows file server cluster to a CIFS share on our NetApp using FSAUtility -pm.  I'm running EV 9.0.4 and my NetApp ONTAP version is 8.0.3.P3.  I did setup the NetApp within EV, but we have no plans to continue archiving on the NetApp.  In fact, we plan to recall all currently vaulted items and retire this EV server (as far as FSA goes).  All my EV services are running on my EV server, but my I've disabled the FSA task in the vault admin console.  I've also set the archiving policy on the volume and the lone target folder on the NetApp CIFS share to NOT archive.

For bulk recalls I prefer to use a powershell script that Symantec provided me.  Their script traverses my filesystem and only recalls the files that currently exist instead of just pulling everything back from the vault.  I run it from the file server where our vaulted items used to be. Since my placeholders are now on CIFS, I mapped a network drive to the CIFS share from my file server and I'm able to run the powershell script. 

This seemed to work ok.  But either the migrated placeholders appear different to the powershell script, or the script is having trouble interpreting what it sees on the network drive, or I'm really unlucky in the test directories I've chosen to test some bulk recalls.

When I run the powershell script, it does not find any offline files.  It finds a number of files where the offline attribute is improperly set, so it clears it.  In multiple tests against different individual folders, it didn't find any files to recall, nor did it find any files with the offline attribute improperly set.  Yet the end result was that it did clear the offline attribute of every placeholder file in the two test folders.  I have screen shots to prove I'm not imagining it.  In these couple of small tests on single folders, the files are readable.

My next test was against a folder that has many subfolders with placeholders throughout.  It again found no placeholders, but several hundred files with the placeholder improperly set.  In this one target folder, every file I've tried to open either errors out or I'm shown a blank document (it depends on the file type).  If I go into ArchiveExplorer and find the problem file, ArchiveExplorer is able to open the file and show me the contents.

For any placeholder on the CIFS share (not in any of previous test folders) that I 2x click on to open, the file is successfully retrieved from the vault. 

I think I want to use FSAUtility to recreate the placeholders for my problem folder, but the documentation is not clear as to whether it will traverse the file system on my CIFS share to recreate what's there now or if it's going to pull everything back to whatever target folder I specify.  Can anyone enlighten me on which it is?

My bigger concern is what's going to happen when I try to recall the rest of the vaulted data?  How am I going to verify that nothing else is corrupted?  I'm looking at 1.5TB of vaulted data to recall.

Another observation is that placeholders on my CIFS share show the "Size on disk" to be the same as the file "size".  On my Windows server, "Size on Disk" would be 4KB no matter how big the file was for any placeholder.  I don't know if this means nothing or if it's a clue that something is wrong with my NetApp/EV setup.

I've tried to get my old case with Symantec re-opened so I could work with the engineer that helped tweak the powershell script, but they won't do it.  I have to go back into the queue and take whomever they assign me - which seems like a big waste of time for them and me.

I realize I'm asking several questions, and I've gotten a little long winded.  Any advice anyone can provide would be a huge help.  At this point I'm unsure how big a problem I have.

 

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