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October 30th, 2015 13:00

Backup and Recovery of Deduplication Windows Server 2012 Volumes

I currently run Avamar 7.0.1-61 and have happened upon a major issue.  Upon finding the issue as it is described in the article in the link we thought installing the hotfix would resolve the problem but in testing we still have the same issue.

https://emc--c.na5.visual.force.com/apex/KB_HowTo?id=kA0700000004c6e


Problem:

1.  We have a Windows Server 2012 machine that we have de-duplication turned on.

2.  We create a policy that backs up this server with the "Perform a Windows Optimized Backup of a Windows Deduplicated volume" checked.

3.  We recover the data to another server that also has de-duplication turned on as documentation explains we must and we have a large number of corrupt files.

First attempt at solution:

1.  We read the article in the link above and deploy the hotfix to all machines that we have de-duplication turned on.

2.  We allow new backups to be created after having the hotfix installed.

3.  We attempt to recover the data to the same second server (again that also has de-dup configured) and we are still unable to open files because of corruption.

Thoughts

The article in the link explains that in order to recover files that the entire volume would have to be recovered to get a reliable restore.  I would love to do this to prove that the backups are actually reliable but recovering 2TB isn't something I feel like doing.

Does anyone have experience with this issue?  Does this mean that file level recovery on all de-duplicated Windows Server 2012 backups are doomed?  I currently have an SR for this issue...but considering that most people are happily backing up their de-duplicated volumes without any knowledge of the struggles if they were ever to recover...I thought I would post this.

8 Posts

November 5th, 2015 06:00

I guess I will take the lack of response as EMC admitting that this is a known issue considering support has not resolved this issue yet and there are no responses here.  I mean it's only 2+TB of data we are backing up...no big deal.

2K Posts

November 5th, 2015 07:00

The community forums are not an official EMC communication channel. Most of the EMC employees who post here volunteer their time to answer questions. Responses (or lack of responses) from EMC employees on these forums do not represent an official company stance in any way whatsoever.

After installing the hotfix on the client, did you rename or otherwise move aside the cache files? If the Avamar client doesn't think the files have changed, it will not back them up again. Renaming the cache files will force the client to reprocess the data.

If you send me the SR number in a private message I can review the SR notes and see if there's anything I can do to nudge the case along.

November 13th, 2015 09:00

jking25, any update to your issue?

I'm interested in enabling deduplication on Windows 2012, and specifically came to the forum to see if there were any issues. Obviously you got one. =/

Thanks!

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