where are my indexes?

Question

Hello all, Somehow I cannot find client indexes on savesets cloned to tapes. I used the mminfo -avot -c w2k, and found no index for last year, though we clone to tapes every end of the month.

ble1 · Answer

Indices are owned by backup server client, not backup client itself.

bingo.1 · Answer

If the client name is not your NW server, you will most likely never find it. CFI backups belong to the NW server, simply because they have been backed up from this node.

CarlosRojas · Answer

Hi,

As Hrvoje and Bingo said, indexes belong to NW server, and saveset name should be something like:

index:client_namexxxx on the NW server side.

To find the physical location of your indexes on NW server run:

nsrls

This will list the tree of the folder and the location of it.

You can always run nsrck -L2 client_name to check the status of indexes, and also you can recover all indexes for all clients or one client at a time by running;

nsrck -L7 client_name (this for one single cliente)

or

nsrck -L7 (This will recover all indexes for all clients and will take some time, depending on your environment and the number of clients).

Thank you,

Carlos

lpamintuan · Answer

Thanks to all who replied.

The reason why I'm searching for client indexes is that I havwe file restore request from 4 months ago and the online copies on the disks were already removed because of the retention setting. Previously, I used the mminfo command to search for the offsite tapes I need, order them back in and scan, but as I mentioned, not even mminfo shows the clone tapes for the that client or savesets. Do I just restore the index from the backup server backups then?

bingo.1 · Answer

Sorry, but it seems that you are not precise enough.

Of course you can scan any tape as long as it has not been recycled (overwritten). This is even possible for tapes which do not exist in the MDB any more.

What surprises me is that you say that "... not even mminfo shows the clone tapes for the that client or savesets."

NetWorker would set a tape and its save sets to expired/recyclable in the MDB but will not touch the data at all.

As long you still have the SSID[/CLONEID] you can rebuild the CFI by running "scanner -i".

However, if the volumes have disappeared, it looks like somebody has deleted these entries from the MDB.

You can still scan the media but finding the right one is much more difficult.

Worst case you have to scan all your unknown tapes.

lpamintuan · Answer

I can still se the list of my tapes from previous months/years in NMC - Media/Tape Volumes, but when I check for savesets in the tapes it says "There are no savesets in this volume" though it is FULL. I guess I'll have to order the tapes and scan them to bring the info back.

Thanks

bingo.1 · Answer

BTW - i forgot to mention that a relabeled tape which has been set to recyclable also appears to be full.

So the first thing you have to do is to verify that the tapes have not been relabeled. If so any additional effort would be a waste of time. That's what you do with the scanner command.

bingo.1 · Answer

FULL does not mean anything - you can even set an empty tape to full (nsrmm -o full volume).

Even NW by itself will set a tape full prematurely (if it cannot recover from a write hard error).

Let me suggest you run "scanner -nv -m device > file" on one of you tapes and post the output here.

NetWorker

where are my indexes?

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