Need to find mediaid for a backup taken on an old and unavailable NB master

[zmlat]

Hello,

I have a legacy windows NetBackup server that was P2V'd a while ago, then upgraded to 7.6. Turns out the original NB install was on a different drive than C, so the P2V, and subsequent upgrade to 7.6 corrupted NB. We were able to recover the db folder from a regular backup (since the catalog backups have since expired). So my question is: is there a way that I can check the files in db/images and get media ID for a particular client?

NB Admin console will not come up fully and bpimagelist returns " operation requested by an invalid server". I found some info on cat_converter command and I can dump the contents of the ".f" file, but I have not been able to get a media ID. If I can get a media ID, I can import to a working NB master.

Thanks.

[Anshu_Pathak · Accepted solution]

The header file which stores information pertaining to backup image has been migrated to DBM dbspace of NBDB since NetBackup 7.5, so now its part of NetBackup relational database (NBDB).

To dump these header files in plain text readable format (like old days) you have to use the command “cat_export -all”. It will create files at <install_path>\db.export

[Anshu_Pathak]

<install_path>\netbackup\db.export

[Marianne]

Seems you could only get back db/images, right? 
Sorry, then you are out of luck.

As per @Anshu_Pathak's excellent post, header files (that contains media info) reside in nbdb database. 

Pity you waited till catalog backups expired.... 
If anything goes wrong with NBU, you should ideally recover from catalog backup right away. Before new backups are taken that will overwrite tapes. 

[mph999]

Although too late for this case ...

Catalog backups should run every day, but I recommend keeping a least one (a full) eg, Fridays for at least 6 months ...

[zmlat]

Thanks all.

I will try the db export.

The tapes are in tact due to our ridiculous retention. Its the catalog thats hosed, By the time we found the P2V was not done correctly, the catalog backup expired, but the data backup tapes have not been overwritten.

[Marianne]

@zmlat 

Your nbdb database needs to be intact in order to export db....