restore from media process

[fshguo]

Hello...I am a newie to Netbackup although I have been using Backup Exec for quite some time, but I see big differences between these two products.

* I was trying to restore a huge folder (cross two tapes). What is the process? do I have to inventory the tape medias first like Backup Exec before the restoration can be performaned?

* for the tape media that can be re-used, is it the same that move it to scratch media?

* what does the vault exactly mean?

thanks for the patience,

fshguo.

[Omar_Villa]

hi fshguo, welcome to the forum, regarding your questions

To restore you need to ensure the tapes are in the silo/autoloader/library and check under the medias panel if you can see the tapes if not you will only need to perform an inventory, if they are already there is ok, you can go to the Backup, Archive & Restore GUI and perform the restore.

Regarding the re-use of media, you only need to be sure they expire all the images and you can move them to the scratch pool, if they still have any image active Netbackup will not allow you to move the medias to any other pool.

Vault is extended product or plug-in used to control the injects and ejects of medias, what is going offsite and what needs to be recall from the vault or outside location, this way you can reuse the medias and automate the ejecting process in a daily basis.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards

[fshguo]

Thanks Omar.

I mainly use the netbackup gui console.

Does that mean to restore, I simply inject the tapes into the slots, I should be able to see the media over the Netbackup console, if not see, can I perform the inventory over the console? if not, what is the command? the tape robot can take around 128 tapes in our case, would the inventory process take a long time to rescan all the tapes again or I can speicify to only inventory the newer injected tapes?

Does Vault set by a value? can you give an example or if there is a documentation so that I can chew it a bit into detail. 

Thanks again,

fshguo.

[sdo]

Hi fshguo, Welcome.

When you inject media into your library, you would normally then run a robot "inventory" and you may also need to tick the "Unload MAP" (Media Access Port) option.  A robot inventrory doesn't read or mount media, it simply scans the barcode so NetBackup knows which media is in any given slot.

As for being able to perform to a restore, NetBackup needs to know what is on the media, and where data is on the media.  Normally, if the media was written in the environment you are on AND the backups (images) have not since expired then you should be able to perform a restore immediately.

BUT, if the images have since expired - or the media is from a different NetBackup environment - or the media is from a BackupExec environment - AND the environment that you are currently on has never seen these media before - THEN you will need to "import" the media (i.e. read the contents of the media and populate the "catalog" which is an index of all backups/images and folders/files) before you can begin your restore.

Imports are done in two stages:

Phase 1 - Read through a media identifying where each backup image begins and ends, and populate the catalog with these basic details.

Phase 2 - Read through the images on the media identifying folder paths, file names, sizes etc - and again populate the catalog with this greater level of detail.

If the media that you want to restore from was new to your environment, then after completing phase1 and phase2 imports then you should be able to perform a restore.