Disaster restore from disk

[NBUAdmin]

I have a master server in siteA and a media server in siteB with NetBackup 6.1mp3. We are backing up to a SAN at each site and then replicating the SAN between the 2 sites.

If there is a disaster in siteB I want to be able to restore replicated data from siteA to new servers. How would I restore the data?

I thought since the master server is in siteB with all the catalog information I should be able to create a storage unit, point it to the SAN and restore the images. I don't see any way to do this in Nebackup. I tried to change the storage unit path to point to the SAN in siteA but it can't find the images this way.

Also, in testing I created a local folder called backup and ran a test backup to that folder. I then moved the images to another folder called backup2 and am unable to restore the file. Any way around this?

[Rakesh_Khandelw]

What are you replicatin from Site B to Site A? For NetBackup, you do not need to do any replication from media server at Site B to Master server at Site A. With NBU 6.0 everthing is located on your master server unless your server on Site B is the EMM server.

After you create new media manager to do local restore on site A, add following to bp.conf file of master server on site A

FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER= fromhost(media manager at Site B) tohost(media manager at site A)

FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER

Applies to NetBackup Enterprise Server:

Forces restores to go to a specific server, regardless of where the files were backed up. The format for the entry follows:

FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER= fromhost tohost

Where fromhost is the server that performed the original backup and tohost is the server to use for the restore.

After adding the FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER entry, stop and restart the NetBackup Request daemon on the master server. Before attempting a restore, physically move the media to tohost and update the Media Manager volume database to reflect the move.

This setting applies to all storage units on the original server. Restores for any storage unit on fromhost will go to tohost. To revert to the original configuration for future restores, delete the entry. (See "Server Independent Restores" on page 522 in the System Administrator’s Guide, Volume I.)

[NBUAdmin]

I have a Windows server so I do not have a bp.conf file but I made the change to the media host override in the master server properties which I believe does the same thing. I am able to restore files in siteA with the master server that were backed up in siteB by the media server there but it uses the storage unit from the siteB SAN and I want to use the storage unit from the siteA SAN.

I am backing up to disk on the SAN in siteB and then replicating the NetBackup images to the SAN in siteA. The problem is the storage units are different. For instance I have a disk storage unit in siteB that points to \\Share\siteB\SU1 and I replicate the data to siteA. When I create a storage unit in siteA and point it to the share there with \\share\siteA\SU1 I am unable to point the restore to pull the images from the new storage unit.

I want to do this to test for disaster and also if there is a real disaster.

[NBUAdmin]

Anyone?? Basically I need to change images in the NetBackup catalog so that the UNC path points to the new location and then be able to restore it and then change it back to the original UNC path. Is there no way of doing this?

The only way I have seen is to expire the image, import it from the new location, perform the restore, expire it again from the new location and then re-import it from it's original location. Of course I have to make the orignal location in-accessable from NetBackup so that NetBackup doesn't delete the image on the original location when I expire it.

This seems ugly to me to have to do it this way. Any help is appreciated.

[Rakesh_Khandelw]

Unfortunately, there is no other straight forward way because your catalog does not know anything about these images on disk. You will have to import these images and for that you will have to expire/move original ones unless you want to muck around image DB. Not a recommended or test way but you can try

you can try making changes to backupid _FULL or incremental whichever you want to use and change the data location to new location. Don't forget to backup/copy the original files to some other place before you make any changes.

[NBUAdmin]

You wrote:

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you can try making changes to backupid _FULL or incremental whichever you want to use and change the data location to new location.

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How exactly would I go about doing that? I've looked in the commands and can't find a way to actually change the data in the image DB. Am I missing something?

[NBUAdmin]

Ok. So I've found that I can edit the file in the Netbackup\db\images\SERVERNAME folders and change the path that way. Is this the only way to do it? No command line utility?

[Rakesh_Khandelw]

It is the only option I can think of, keep in mind this may not be a supported process but you can give it a try to achieve what you want. I am not aware of any command/GUI function to perform this change.

Good Luck!!