SAN Catalog restore slow and failing.

[Former_Mary_Kay]

Has anyone had issues with their SAN catalog backups going slow, and have a solution for it?

We do Hot Catalog Backups inline to tape (off-site - copy 1) and disk (on-site - copy 2).  We are now testing the restorability of the on-site SAN based copy, and are having issues with it going slow (6 hours vs.. 2 hours from tape) and then failing at the end; where it's trying to find the tapes used during the same backup.

Why would it want to tapes when we are trying to restore from the disk copy?  We even removed all the tape information from the DR file.  Why would it be running so slow?

We are using 6.5.2 on Solaris 9.  Any help would be appreciated...

[Nicolai]

Netbackup always try to restore from primary copy. You may check that first - use bpimagelist. Look for field 28 in the IMAGE entry.  Or promote a secondary copy to the primary copy with bpexpdate -set_primary function.

You may also take at look at this tech tip, I found it quite handy while testing catalog restore :  How to create a blank NetBackup NBDB database for the recovery of the NetBackup NBDB database from a...

And this one also -  Catalog restore on clustered system fails with status 13

Regards

Nicolai

[Former_Mary_Kay]

How do you promote a catalog backup when your catalog hasn't even been restored yet?  bpimagelist comes back with nothing.

Also, the links you provided are broken.

Message Edited by SJ Hollist on 10-03-2008 07:18 AM

[Nicolai]

You promote backup copies of a existing catalog backup before you start restoring. Let's say you have written a catalog backup to a disk staging storage unit and then to tape afterwards. However the DDSU then crashed holding the latest version of the catalog backup  - if you then try to restore the catalog,  Netbackup would look at the disk to perform the restore and fail. In that scenario you would promote the tape version to the primary one.

Remember if you have more that one copy of a backup image, there is always one primary and X number of secondary.  So if you are doing inline copy of the catalog backup one will be the primary copy and the other the secondary copy.  Netbackup ALWAYS restore from the primary version.

Hope this clarify ..

BR

Nicolai

[Former_Mary_Kay]

I understand how primary copies work, but what I don't understand is how it relates to rebuilding the system from the ground up and restoring the catalog to it...

If I just rebuilt the system, NetBackup doesn't know anything about either copy of the catalog backup, so what you are saying I should do doesn't make any sense.  NetBackup will just say, I don't know anything about that copy you are trying to promote to a primary copy, because my catalog is empty, because you haven't restored the catalog yet. (i.e. Entity not found).

I'm using the DR file to tell it what to restore, so why is the catalog restore trying to find the primary copy when I already told it to use the secondary copy for the catalog restore?

[Nicolai]

OK -  I see. In that case you are right - it doesn't make sense with a empty Netbackup catalog to promote anything. 

I have tried something similar with disk staging storage unit and run into problems as well. I decided to delete the disk based images to emulate a complete disaster. The recovery process never went beyond looking for the disk based images. I didn't investigate but decided to rely on tape.

Do know the tech note below ? - I find it quite handy when working with catalog restore tests.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/284299.htm

Regard

Nicolai