Searching NB Catalog

[marcymarc24]

Here's a good one...

NetBackup 6.0MP6 master on Solaris 10 server.

Someone has asked me if it is possible to search the entire NetBackup catalog to look for a particular type of file and then list the location (host/path)?

I know you can use bplist on the cmd line to search and also on the GUI from the recovery window but I think you can only do this with the host specified.

Is there another way at all this could be done?

-Marc

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Hi,

You'll need to run bpplclient -allunique -pt Standard to give you a list of all the clients. You'll then push that into the -C of bplist to run through each client and look for the file.

bpplclient -allunique -pt Standard | while read clt

do

bplist -keyword "search string" -C $clt -t 0 -R -l /

done

or something to that effect :)

[Ed_Wilts]

Users have been asking for a more global type of search but Symantec hasn't announced anything yet.  It's certainly doable but non-trivial especially if you have files that could be backed up by various policy types (Standard, Windows, FlashBackup Windows, FlashBackup Solaris, NDMP, etc.)

I can't tell you how many times a user has asked me to search for file "foo" without knowing what directory foo is in, which virtual server is hosting that path, or have any clue of which DFS path may lead to the file.  Sometimes we have a file that may go from server to server in its processing lifecycle and may have been grabbed by NetBackup on any one of the servers.

I know I'm not alone in asking...

[Abesama]

I agree in that there are many people out there who asks for data to be recovered while they are not exactly sure what they've lost

But customers can't ask for "anything" simply because they think they are the boss (or simply because they think we are so capable of making sense out of their silly requests)

Not only in I.T. but in any situation, if a person wants something (back) he/she needs to know what it is that he/she wants - at least to a degree that the other party can understand what it is ... am I asking for too much here?

Asking for a file "foo" from "some directory" on "some server" is like a child keep shouting "I lost it, I lost it" ...

If the data is of some value so that you even need a backup and recovery for it, then one should know some basics about it

am I too critic?

I'm not talking about those people asking for file abcd to be restored to their Z drive on their desktop while it's actually backed up from E drive of the fileserver

NetBackup is an Enterprise Backup Solution, I'm not sure if DLO option has the capability to search catalog only by filename ... it's been ages since I logged on to one

Abe

[Andy_Welburn]

Unfortunately they can & they do!

Had a few calls along the lines of "I've lost some data/file. Can't remember where it was, what it was called or when I 'lost' it, but it's not there now can I have it back?" - "WHAT?".

We had a similar conversation, on the forum I think, sometime back - someone wanted something restoring from a backup that had NEVER even been on the system!!!

[RiaanBadenhorst]

The only thing you lost in such a case would be your mind

[marcymarc24]

So just to check this will get what I'm after, if I want to use bplist to search for a particular file on a client, something like below should be ok?

bplist -C <client> -l -R "*.doc"

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Did it work? Sorry, dont have a system at hand to check on.

[marcymarc24]

It did,

the option in the bplist command I was was looking for was -PI which searches through all paths so the command I used was something like...

bplist -B -C <clientname> -b -l -R -t 0 -s "07/01/2010 12:00:00" -e "11/28/2010 12:00:00" -PI "*.txt"

to search for all txt files for example.

Thanks for all the help above.

-Marc

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Exellent