Hardlinks are not restored on Solaris by NBU 7.0

[alexs77]

Hello.

We're using NetBackup 7.0 with a Master & Media Server running on Windows Server 2003 and 7.0 clients on Sparc Solaris 10. After having done a larger test restore, I noticed that the restore contained A LOT fewer files then there should be.

Espec ially hard links are missing. For example, in the /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Africa directory, there should be:

 --($ /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Africa)-- ls -lai As*
178026 -rw-r--r-- 2 root bin 74 2009-12-08 04:40 Asmara
178026 -rw-r--r-- 2 root bin 74 2009-12-08 04:40 Asmera

But in the restored directory, there's only:

 --($ /SAN/restore-test/race-dev/snapshots/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Africa)-- ls -la As*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 74 2009-12-08 04:40 Asmara 

As you can see, the "Asmera" file is missing; only the first encountered Asmara file had been restored. If you pay attention to the "ls -lai" output above, you'll see that those two files have the same inode number and thus the link counter is 2; IOW: those files are hard linked.

When I did the restore, I selected the top level "/" directory, so yes, all of the links should've been restored at the same time - but as can be seen, this didn't happen. I guess that's also the reason, why the restore completed with code 5 "the restore failed to recover the requested files"?

Backup and restore were done from/to a Solaris 10 server. We're using the ZFS filesystem, if that matters. I'm attaching screenshots showing the policy settings. As far as the backup selection window is concerned - I'm NOT backing up the / directory, but instead a /.backup directory which contains ZFS snapshots of the real filesystems. I verified that the hard links ARE present in the source snapshots.

What's going on there?

Thanks,

Alexander

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Have you read this?

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH10897

[alexs77]

Riaan,

yes, I have read the note - sorry, should've mentioned this...

But I don't think the note is relevant in my case. As I understand the note, itŝ mainly only then important, if you do partial restores. But here, I'm trying to restore a complete backup; IOW: complete directories. And for that, the note states:

When a restore to an alternate location of the entire directory is initiated, NetBackup will restore all files and hard links appropriately:

I find this not to be true...

But there's one thing in the note, which confuses me. Namely this:

NOTE  When restoring hard-linked files to any alternate location, Rename Hard Links must be selected in the Specify Alternate Path section

Where should this setting be? I initiated the restore from the Windows master/media server.

Alexander

[RiaanBadenhorst · Accepted solution]

To restore a UNIX backup that contains soft and hard links, run the Backup, Archive, and Restore client interface from a UNIX machine. Only the Java version of the client interface contains the Rename hard links and Rename soft links restore options. Windows users can install the Windows display console to access the Java version of the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface from a Windows machine.

[alexs77]

Riaan,

just wanted to confirm, that I got a successful restore using the jbpSA java gui.

Thanks a lot!

Alexander

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Excellent!