Restore Largs amount of files FT Backup(Using FlashBackup) to Nas Share

[SnirA]

Hello,

 We have windwos server that has A LOT of files in one of his Drives ( more than 2 million files), he see this disk from SAN.

There is a need to move all those files and data from our san Storage to the netapp storage.

our storage admin thinks the best way is using backup and restore.

we do his backups using Fibre Transport and Flashbackup.

How would you advice on restoring the files the fastest way, takeing into account that we cant change the drive letter.

Now doing normal restore takeing over 14 hours!!

Thanks for the help!

Regards,

[Mark_Solutions]

You would need to mount the NAS share as a mount point on the media server to do it - it would need to be set as a drive letter and have the same volume as the original disk

Even that can get tricky and everything has to be right or it will look like it is working but when finished nothing is there - monitor the restore lot via the view status option in the BAR GUI to see if it is failing as the job in activity monitor wont always show that it is - at least you can then cancel it and try again

When mounted as a drive letter it would restore as a flashbackup restore - so will overwrite the "partition" completely - please bear that in mind

Hope this helps

[SnirA]

Hi,

Thanks for the response, What do you mean by having the same volume name ?

Do you mean I need to show this media server the new mount point through the san, as if i was allocation disk from my Storage array ?

Regards,

[Mark_Solutions]

Not the name - but the same size as the original - with flashbackup you restore the whole volume so that is what it will try and do during the restore

Set as a mount point on the media server and then redirected restore to there

These seem to be very touchy as to whether they work or not so may take a little trial and error but once you get it right then it is a handy proceedure for the future

[SnirA]

Please correct me, but If im not mistaken, the only way to do a restore to a shared folder (thorugh NAS)

is only by using the UNC Path.. how am i to do it  if i need to keep the same name for flash restore?

[Mark_Solutions]

You dont need to keep the same name ....

The shared folder needs to be mounted as a mount point on the media server and a redirected restore done to that location

It has to be a "volume" to do a flashbackup entire volume restore to it as it restores at block level

Otherwise your only option is to do the UNC path normal restore (which is what you said you were doing initially but was taking a long time)

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

My feeling is that Volume/Raw restore will not work when restoring to NAS storage via UNC path.

The restore will have to be a normal/file level restore. Restore wil be slow due to the millions of files and probably directory depth and due to the fact that restore can only be done via the network.
Hopefully these factors were taken into consideration when the choice was made to migrate from file server to NAS....

Doing restore from cmd (or script) using bprestore will be a lot quicker as the initial browsing of the image catalog will be skipped. (We had a customer who chose this route a couple of years ago when they migrated to a new file server.)
Be prepared to spend some time to get the syntax right for bprestore - there are so many variables and each site is unique which make it difficult for this forum to assist.

[SnirA]

Hi Marianne,

It sounds like a good idea, how should I build this script, do you have an example?

[SnirA]

It is true, however, im not able to show disks from netapp as volumes, it will require changes in the netapp.

[Marianne]

As I've said - assisting with bprestore is almost impossible without insight into the environment - it took quite a while previously to figure out bprestore syntax for the customer back then.

The first thing to do is to correctly identify what needs to be restored. Get bplist to work before you try bprestore.

I have shared my personal experience with bprestore over here:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/bprestore-cli-command#comment-5080921

As you can see from my post, not always easy, but once you have the syntax right, it is all 'plain sailing'...

[SnirA · Accepted solution]

Update:

The migrate of the data was done using snapvault of netapp.