We have warned, begged, pleaded, and threatened, but some application owners want to keep everything forever.
I have a system with a file system with over 29 million files. Of course no one can afford advanced client. No one wants a raw partition backup because they may want that 1 file. You have heard the excuses. Well, the storm hit. I am moving a server to another data center and had to move the SAN volumes via tape. (Don't start telling me a better way of moving this stuff, that is not the point of this email and I have been suggesting ways for a while). I could not fire off a restore of the entire file system. It would just stay in the queue. I started seeing what I could fire off. I started selecting some subdirectories and was able to restore. There were only 21,300 individual subdirectories, so clicking a few in the GUI was NOT an option. I did a bplist and got the subdir names. Using split, I split the subdir names into groups of 50. Gave me 425 file lists. I ran a script to brute force the restores. Uh-oh. 1 tape with the data on it. Not enough memory to calculate the restore list for 425 restore jobs concurrently. There is a "-w" switch on the bprestore command. I now know what it is for. If you are scripting, it prevents the next restore from firing off until the previous restore is finished. I had to go with it to keep everything from timing out in the queue and not knowing what had run and what had not. I did include the "-L" to keep up with what had / had not fired. Data is going back and the restore will be successful. Howerver, someone promised that the system would be online for testing 10 hours after it was installed. I had told them several times this week that the full backup took 35 hours, so don't expect a quick restore. Point of the email is that "yes, we can back up millions of files without paying for advanced client, but we can't restore the data per your RTO/SLA". Bobby Williams 2205 Peterson Drive Chattanooga, Tennessee 37421 423-296-8200
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