Attempting to restore catalog using DR Wizard

[Bruce_Clegg]

I was given the task to restore all data back to the beginning of time for certain servers.  Overall the restore went pretty well.  Many of the archive tapes were not in the current catalog, so I imported them. - but I ran into an issue where starting about 8 years ago, many of our archive tapes had duplicate bar-codes/media id's to newer archive media.

Once the project is over, we won't need these 8-12 year old tapes in the current catalog - but we really needed to see that restored data - so right before I started importing the old tapes by over-writing the newer ones, I took a full backup of the catalog and named it /opt/openv/netbackup/catalog/RESTOREPOINT_CatalogBackup_1476911044_Full

I completed the restore project and now I want to recover the catalog using the Disaster Recovery wizard.  When I start the wizard and browse to my restore file - I just get told: Failed to load DR image /opt/.../catalog/RESTOREPOINT_CatalogBackup_1476911044_Full (20)

Is this because DR needs to recover to an empty database?  Is there a better way to restore my old catalog without going through the DR wizard?

Thanks!

[Bruce_Clegg]

Running the restore in place will end up merging the catalog images instead of over righting it. This will need to be run with the new images and nbdb removed. Here are the steps.

take a hot catalog backup

kill all nbu services

rm -rf * /usr/openv/db/images/*

rm -rf * /usr/openv/db/data/*

cp /usr/openv/db/tmp/* /usr/openv/db/data/.

start services and add the storage unit for the dr

open the admin console and run the catalog recovery wizard

Is there a better way?

[mph999]

It's difficult to give an answer.

By the book, the manual states to delete everything, create a blank EMM DB and restore.

From a support point of view, sometimes we leave the flat file part of the catalog (.f files) in place and effectivly 'merge' them with the restore - then sort out the mess afterwards.

Regarding NBDB, this can't be merged (well it can, but only via the catman tool) and a catalog restore will overwrite it.

There are two parts to the  catalog as you know:

NBDB (internal Sybase DB)

Flat files.

Does this help ?

[mph999]

The netbackup/db/images dir could have been left alone, the backup id's on the 'old' tapes would be different.

You could then just copy back a flat file copy of NBDB amd then manually delete the 'old image files' from netbackup/db/images, as after NBDB is put back, there will be no reference to them in the database.

Alternativly you could make a online backup of NBDB with nbdb_backup -online and then recover NBDB with nbdb_restore which is the supported method.