How to find which tape has an expired image

[MattS]

Unfortunately one of my oracle DBA's forget our retention period and waited to long to request a restore of a database.  My screw up is that I have the logs clean up just a day shy of when the backup I need occurred. On the client I have no logs enabled that will show which tape the backup used so I can't even go back and restore older logs because none would help.  My second screw is up not backing up the master server logs either :(.  I have 23 LTO3 tapes that the backup could have used and scanning them all will take a long time.  Is there somewhere else I can look that can tell me which tapes were used for this particular backup?  If I can even narrow it down to the tapes that were used on that night it would help greatly.

I also tried looking in the Vault logs but it seems to only show active images.  It doesn't show up in the current catalog either.

A couple ideas I have:

-Restore an older catalog somewhere and look in it for the expired images.  No idea how to do that or if it's possible.

-The servers involved are a Solaris9 master, Solaris 10 media, the client is Oracle Linux4.  I'm still pretty noobish in the Unix world, could there be a OS related log that may have recorded which tapes were mounted that night?

There is a NetApp VTL in the loop but it doesn't log any netbackup related information... I guess I could see which of those 23 tapes were used that night... have to try that, thanks me! lol

Anyways, any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[Status_Code_0]

I'm pretty sure you can import images off the tapes (if they are not already overwritten that is).  Bpimport commands should work I think.

[MattS]

Thanks for the response but the problem I have is a step before that.  Locating the tapes the image resides on.  I can only narrow it down to 23 and with some backups running during the day i have to use a standalone drive on my desktop :(.  So it is going to take a long time.

[Status_Code_0]

You could try to use Reports to dig around and see if it will go back to the date you are looking for.  I'm pretty sure most reports will only go back as far as the catalog though...

DBAs - The death of all good Storage Administrators....

Good luck

[Rakesh_Khandelw · Accepted solution]

If it is NBU 6.x  and you have old catalog tapes (Hot Backup), you can restore the selecting images, for the particular day, for this client from image DB and that can tell you which media it needs or if you have an old filesystem level backup including /usr/openv/netbackup/db/images directory from your master server you can restore the selective images from it.

If you don't have these, you can look into you old vault report (if you had set the email from Vault) and look for the media used or media went offiste on that particular day or next day and do the import on tapes. 

[MattS]

Thanks Rakesh.  I forgot about the images directory, next time, i do have backups of that.  Fortunetly the first tape i scanned had the backups!  Lucky me :)

Message Edited by MattS on 07-22-2008 12:31 PM