Performing a VBA resurrection

Question

I've read what's available for performing resurrection recoveries in VBA and I'm not sure I understand the whole picture since I haven't done it and my current client doesn't have a lab. We will have to power off permanently, the existing DD that Networker/VBA has been backing up to. Backups were cloned to local tape and all DD backups have expired. The tape backups need kept for another 6 months but we won't have the same DD available. I'm guessing the resurrection solution is to create a 2nd VBA where Data Domain is configured to the Networker server node. Configure this VBA to the same vcenter, same Networker, and new Data Domain. Add all cloned clients to the new VBA policy. Restores should work using the new VBA? I guess by adding cloned clients to the policy you're adding these clients to the virtual Avamar in VBA. Then Networker clones the data from tape to the new DD, and VBA restores that to vcenter. Note*:  I read that clients must be added to the new policy/VBA, however these backups are more than 6 months old and most of the clients backed up no longer exist in vcenter, so I would not be able to add those to the new VBA. Has anyone done this successfully?  Thanks in advance.

gautamgp · Answer

If you are planning do Decommission the DD then it shouldn't be a problem as long as you have the existing VBA. Existing VBA will have all the metadata and you should be able to restore from the Tape as long as you have another spare DD to do the staging.

Hans_n_Franz · Answer

I agree with the idea that somehow it should work, however I have not been successful in changing the VBA to a second Data Domain and performing a restore using the policies from the old Data Domain/local tape. The Avamar piece of VBA was complaining that it could not connect to the new data domain when we updated Networker's original DD device with the new DD device path and we had to roll back.

I know the new Data Domain can work with the VBA as I previously created a new policy, created a backup on new DD, cloned the backup, deleted the backup, and restored the backup to the same DD.

Can I get an example of how to change the VBA config or restore from a policy of a different DD where the retention is 1 year, and even though the vm client may be gone, we need to be able to restore the VBA backup that was cloned to tape to a new Data Domain until these backups reach end of retention and expire. Thanks in advance.

NetWorker

Was this post helpful?