Recovering data and restoring backup images
Recovering data can be a difficult and time consuming process. The success of recovery often depends on how well you prepare for disaster and subsequent recovery.
Note:
Effective disaster recovery procedures are specific to an environment and provide detailed information about everything that should be accomplished to prepare for disaster and to recover after disaster occurs. Veritas provides general disaster recovery information that is intended as a model only. You must evaluate the information and then develop your own disaster recovery plans and procedures.
The steps you have to perform to recover can depend on the configuration of your original system and robotic devices, your original NetBackup configuration, the configuration of your recovery system and robots, and the configuration of NetBackup on the recovery systems. Therefore, providing specific disaster recovery procedures for all situations is not possible. Rather, these procedures are intended as general guidelines from which you can create your own procedures for recovering NetBackup and the data that was transferred off-site.
Although some detail is included about restoring the NetBackup catalogs to a recovery system, these procedures do not provide detail about every step of the recovery procedure.
Information in this section assumes the following:
The primary backup images are unavailable.
The NetBackup master and media server software, Vault software, client software, and devices are installed and robots and drives are configured on systems to which you are recovering data.
The NetBackup catalogs and data media have not been recalled from off-site storage.
The Recovery Report is available.
You know the name of the off-site volume group name to which the recovered images belong.
You know the names of the original master and media servers.
To recover data and restore backup images
- Using the Recovery Report, identify the current catalog backup media and the media that is required to restore the data.
The Recovery Report is organized by policy, so you should determine which policies were used to back up the data you want to recover.
- Recall the appropriate catalog backup and data media from off site storage.
- Recover the catalog.
See "Recover the Catalog from an Online, Hot Backup" in the NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide.
- If necessary, perform device discovery in NetBackup.
By default, NetBackup catalog backups include the NetBackup device configuration information. If the recovery system has a different device configuration than the original system, the device configuration from the original system overwrites the device configuration when the catalog is recovered.
- If the master and media server names on the recovery system are different than the original system, change the server names in the NetBackup catalogs by using the bpimage command.
The bpimage command and options required are as follows:
bpimage -newserver recovery_system -oldserver original_system
You can also use the bpimage command if the old system had separate media servers and the recovery system has a combined master and media server. Use the name of the combined master or media server for the argument to the -newserver option.
- Specify the backup copy from which to restore by adding the copy number to the file ALT_RESTORE_COPY_NUMBER.
After you add the copy number to the file, all subsequent restore operations restore from that backup copy. The restore can be from the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface or from the bprestore command. Exception: the bprestore -copy x option and argument override the value in the ALT_RESTORE_COPY_NUMBER file.
The ALT_RESTORE_COPY_NUMBER file must be in the following directory on the NetBackup master server:
UNIX
/usr/openv/netbackup
Windows
install_path\VERITAS\NetBackup
See "Restoring from a specific backup copy" in the Backup, Archive, and Restore help.
- If the media is not suspended or frozen, suspend the media.
Use the bpmedia command to suspend the media. Suspending the media prevents NetBackup from writing backup images to that media.
- If the NetBackup Administration Console is not running, start it.
- Inject the media into the robot.
Injecting the media moves it into the robot and also changes the off-site volume group attribute of the media to robotic volume group so NetBackup knows that the volumes are in the robot and ready for restore operations.
- Using the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface, restore the data.
See the NetBackup Backup, Archive, and Restore Getting Started Guide.
- After restoring all of the data, revault the media.