Hi, one of my Solaris admins had to restore the boot disk recently. It didn't go well! Everything was restore eventually but it took a long time because the mount points of symbolic links were never backed up. He had to make them manually and restart the restore. The client os is Solaris 8, TSM client is 5160. (My TSM server is on Solaris 9, level 5343). I see a feature added at the 522 level called 'include.attribute.symlink'. My question for anyone supporting Solaris is did you have this problem and did 'include.attribute.symlink' fix it? Thanks, Bill Colwell Draper Lab Here is the admins note to me -- We have a Solaris 8 machine with the following filesystems: # df -k Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 4131866 3423633 666915 84% / /proc 0 0 0 0% /proc mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5 11114920 7211849 3791922 66% /var swap 207058792 40 207058752 1% /var/run swap 207902688 843936 207058752 1% /tmp /dev/md/dsk/d3 246393677 117406778 126522963 49% /vsmodels /dev/md/dsk/d4 246393677 60366051 183563690 25% /vstools /dev/md/dsk/d5 702176891 612652932 82502191 89% /home gbc:/vol/vol1/tools 250524060 230791752 19732308 93% /nfs/tools fs1:/export/pub/SunOS-5.8-sparc 390523840 211332012 179191828 55% /nfs/pub We lost the boot disk (c0t0d0) and had to restore the / and /var filesystems from TSM backups (by attaching the replacement disk to another machine and performing a cross-restore). But all of the filesystems listed above (except for / itself) are mounted on empty directories (mount points) in either / or /var. But, because TSM backs up each filesystem as a separate "filespace", and because it does not back up explicitly excluded filesystems (/tmp, /var/run), NFS filesystems (/nfs/*), or special system "filesystems" (/proc, /etc/mnttab, /dev/fd) at all, the empty directories that serve as the mount points do not get backed up as part of the parent filespace backup. Therefore, when one does a full restore of
any filesystem, it is necessary to manually re-create all of the mount points for anything that mounts within it (not something one wants to have to remember to do when one has been up all night waiting for the restore to complete, with angry users clamoring to get on!). Since TSM is smart enough to determine what to exclude (either explicitly or implicitly) and what is a separate filespace, it ought to be clever enough to put into the backup for any filespace all of the empty directories that will be necessary to mount the things that were excluded or backed up separately.