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Tape recovery

Josh_CG
Level 3

I am new to Netbackup system. We have a new requirement to review and assess all contents and restore options of over a 1000 tapes that are stored at a remote location for a few years now. All I got is the tapes and the barcodes on it. The backup servers (mgmt, media etc) are all decommissioned a while ago. We got an old tape library at another location where I am planning to explore the recoverability of these tapes. We also have the Netbackup server 7.6.0.1 installed on a Linux platform at this location + Netbackup Java version on a Windows server as well.

I would like to know if we have any chance to restore any data from these tapes using the above servers and the tape library. Any help will be appreciated. 

Thanks

 

20 REPLIES 20

quebek
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Hello

That will be painful process as you do not have NBU catalog - which was aware what was written where (which tape). Now all you can do is to try to perform import of these tapes, but I am not foreseeing a lot of luck for this... but it is doable if you are really pertinacious

You need to perform phase 1 of import (which retention is like 1 week - check this out https://vox.veritas.com/t5/NetBackup/import-phase-one-information-retention/td-p/293316 ) and once all tapes are found from the same backup image (so called fragments) you can only then do phase 2 of import....

Links to import docs:

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/18716246-129889741-0/v41087825-129889741

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/18716246-129889741-0/v41087956-129889741

Marianne
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In addition to above excellent post, you need to check that you have tape drives that can read those tapes.

LTO2 for example can be read on LTO2, LTO3 and LTO4 tape drives.
LTO3 tapes can be read on LTO3, LTO4 and LTO5 tape drives.
So, same and 2 generations later.

Phase 1 import will at least prove that the tape can be read.

Take note that all tapes in a backup set must complete phase 1 import before you can start phase 2. 

quebek
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I just found this one https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100009842 - I believe it might be helpful as well...

Thanks a lot for all that valuable info. Sounds like its going to be fun.Let me load the tapes next week and see if its going to make any sense to continue with this project. It might take a while to make any breakthrough as I am foreseeing some troubles and road blocks during this process. Hopefully some good news. Let me update you with some progress soon.

There are 18 drives in the library and its all LTO4. I received the first set of tapes that's over 325 and I have loaded them all in to the library. Hope to receive the rest in a week time. My understanding is that its better to load all the tapes, complete phase-1 and then move to phase-2.

There's a chance that these are all True Image Backups. Not sure if we can restore a TIB this way.

 

 

 

mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Beaware that after phase 1, the retention time is 7 days, meaning that if you don't complete phase 2 within that time, it will expire ...  (after phase 2, the petention period will be set to whatever the retention level on the tape is set to for the environment the tape is imported on) - so after import , check the expire time is acceptable.

After phase 1, you can bpexpdate the tape to a later date, to give you mre than 7 days.

Thanks for that. Is it okay to run the command before we start phase-1? Looks like the command is "touch /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/NOexpire"

 

 

mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

NOexpire should not be used (people do, but it's unsupported and can cause issues).

The correct way is to phase 1 import, and then just use bpexpdate -d <date> -m <mediaid> on the tape(s).  Just pick a date way into the furture.

We got around 700 tapes to import. Do I need to run the command for each media-id (tape)?

Thanks

 

mph999
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Yes, once the phase1 import has finished, extend the tape with bpexpdate.

Alexis_Jeldrez
Level 6
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Are you sure that the original Master Server didn't do Catalog Backups on tape?

If you're lucky you could find catalog backups, restoring a full one could bring you the whole data in one single restore.

Doing the phase-1 imports should give you the name of the backed-up server and the name of the policy: you could search for the name of the Master Server and for a policy with the name "catalog" or "Netbackup internal backup" or something along those lines. Good luck and patience!

I started the phase-1 today. Below are the results that I see for the 1st tape when I started the 'initiate import'. Does this mean that the imports are not going to work or should I continue to import phase-1 for all the remaining tapes and go to Phase-2?

Import phase 1 started June 11, 2018 09:26:47 AM PDT
09:26:47 INF - Create DB information for media id PG0000.
09:26:47 INF - Initiation of bptm process to phase 1 import media id PG0000 was successful.
09:26:49 INF - Status = extended error status has been encountered, check logs.
09:26:49 INF - Consult the Activity Monitor for more information about this job.

 Activity Monitor:

06/11/2018 09:26:46 - begin Import
06/11/2018 09:26:48 - Info bptm (pid=21039) start
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - started process bptm (pid=21039)
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - Error bptm (pid=21039) NBJM returned an extended error status: Media pool is not eligible for this job (2098)
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - Error bpimport (pid=21031) Status = extended error status has been encountered, check logs.
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - Info bptm (pid=21039) EXITING with status 252 <----------
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - end Import; elapsed time 0:00:03
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - requesting resource PG0000
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - Error nbjm (pid=28167) NBU status: 2098, EMM status: Media pool is not eligible for this job
06/11/2018 09:26:49 - Error nbjm (pid=28167) NBU status: 2098, EMM status: Media pool is not eligible for this job
An extended error status has been encountered, check detailed status (252)


Job State: Done(Failed)

 

Troubleshooter details:
If a process was unable to report the extended error status as the final job status, the job exits with status 252. (The extended error status has a number greater than 255.)

 

 

So I am done with the phase-1 import. The search result found over 2000 backup images so it looks like some progress have been made so far. I am still not sure if all tapes that belong to each of these images are available or not. What will happen if not. There may be some missing tapes.

Also I need to run the command not to expire the phase-1 import. Do I need to run this command on each of the tapes or is there a way to run a single command with all the media-ids, something like the below one.

#bpexpdate -d 12/31/2018 -m fv0100, fv0101, fv0102

(to extend the expiry date to 31st Dec., 2018 for media-ids fv0100, fv0101 and fv0102. Also let me know if the date format is correct or not)

 

once again, thanks a lot to all of you for your response to the Netbackup restore queries.

 

quebek
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If import will not find all backup fragments for a given image (the ones from the middle, end) it will fail. If there will be missing fragment 1st - it won't do phase 2 stating 1st fragment is needed.

About one command, maybe try this

export mediaids="mediaid1 mediaid2 mediaid3 etc"

for i in ${mediaids} ; do echo Working on media ID ${i}; bpexpdate -d desired_date -m ${i} -force ; done

so not maybe one command - but so called one-liner :) this is for *nix boxes... it can be rewritten onto windows cmd for sure....

The script may not work. I am getting the below messages for some of the tapes while running the command.

the requested operation was partially successful
EXIT STATUS 2516: Failed to process an image whose expiration date is in the past
requested media id is not assigned to this host in the EMM database

Not sure if these are issues that we can fix.

 

 

 

quebek
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It means that the media you were willing to extande expiration date is already expired.... 

Looks like phase 1 needs to be run again...

I imported these tapes once again now and executed the bpexpdate command right after the import. Its the same error again. 

EXIT STATUS 2516: Failed to process an image whose expiration date is in the past

I got more than 15 tapes with the same error. Not sure what's causing these errors. Any idea if these erros will cause problems during phase-2 of the import?

 

quebek
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Can you share the import log file and then the command you are using to change retention?

Also can you show this output ls -la /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/NOexpire