BMR restore not yielding expected results

[smakovits]

I must start by saying we are just getting into BMR, so it might be user error, but something is definitly not working correctly or so it appears.

I will start with a simple question, when you do a BMR restore to a date of an incremental backup, BMR is smart enough to restore the full and then apply all incremental restores on top of that until it hits the specified date, is that correct?

OK, now for my issue.  I am doing a restore to Tuesday nights backup as my application owner blew up the server during an install yesterday.  The server appears to restore correctly, but when the server reboot, a bunch of the services do not start.  NBU services being a prime example.  At first I thought OK, maybe something is really borked, so I went back a day or 2 and still nothing.

At this point I was getting really confused, so I was watching the messages closely.  Because I wanted to go to a different date, I created a configuration and set the point in time I wanted to go to.  I gave it a generic name like A27.  Now, when the BMR process is starting and the message appears, loading configuration "CURRENT"... Is that right?  Should it not say loading "A27"?  I am thinking this might have something to do with why my restore complete sucessfully, but the system is still not usable, but I am not sure.

Any thoughts?  The whole BMR process seems pretty mindless when restoring to the same server, but these results are not as expected.
 

Thanks

[mandar_khanolka]

>>>I will start with a simple question, when you do a BMR restore to a date of an incremental backup, BMR is smart enough to restore the full and then apply all incremental restores on top of that until it hits the specified date, is that correct?

<Mandar> YES. BMR can restore from any full, incremental, synthetic and point in time backup.

>>> Now, when the BMR process is starting and the message appears, loading configuration "CURRENT"... Is that right?  Should it not say loading "A27"?

<Mandar> A27 should come. I hope you did "prepare to restore" step with A27 edited configuration.

Also all services should come online after BMR restore.

Can you provide some more info like:

1. NB release version details

2. NB master and client OS version details

Thanks.

-Mandar

[smakovits]

We are running 7.0.1 on a AIX 6.1 Master.  Client is running 2008 R2.

As for adding a little more information, I have since discovered what is going on.  Because it is 2008, it is backing up the exe files for running services in the shadow copy component, so this is why I cannot see them in the file level backups and the reason they are not available for restore.  I ended up running a manual restore of shadow copy components last week and suddenly it brought back the files needed to run my services.  Therefore, this now leaves me to question what is happening during the restore and why shadow copy componnents are not being properly restored.  Any thoughts would be great.

Also, as part of this, is there any way to create a tar log for the BMR restore process?

[Suchitra]

BMR does take care of restoring the System State and Shadow Copy components. For Windows 2008, Shadow Copy Components are quite minimal. Active Directory, ASR( Boot files), Registry, Certified Authority, Task Schedular data, Performance counters, COM +DB, VSS Writer stuff gets backed up under System State. Most of the hardlinks also are part of the System State.

BMR restores them back to their respective locations.

Recently an issue has been noticed related to Certified Authority(CA) and DHCP files. Some files that belong to CA & DHCP do not get copied back to the right location after a BMR restore. So a manual restore of those files after first boot is suggested. Please consult Symantec Support if you are facing a similar issue.

Thanks

[smakovits · Accepted solution]

It turns out there were some EEBs that were required for executables to be restored.  eebinstaller.2222394.1.AMD64 and eebinstaller.2222394.1.x86

This EEB contained a new bmrrst file that needed to be put into the SRT, replacing the one that was there.  Once the SRT was updated with the new file, I was able to run the BMR restore successfully.  While all previous restores also completed with a status 0, this time when the system booted back up, all of my services were started.

For whatever reason, without the EEB in place, the executables contained in the shadow copy components for all running services were skipped during the restore, but the system failed to report it as an incomplete backup.  Therefore, without any  knowledge of the missing EEB, there is no real way to know why the successful restore was actually failing.  Even the logs collected didn't give any information, unless of course I was collecting the wrong logs.