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ArcServe 2000 restore files to only 32kb
I've done a lot of restores from my tape system (PV-100T with Arcserve 2000), and it always worked okay. I needed to restore some files lately and when they came off the tape they all were 32kb or less, instead of the actual size. I went back through my tapes and found out my last 5 backups were all this way. I'm assuming I'm pretty much up a creek without a padel as far as my restore. It looked like it worked perfectly, until I saw the file sizes. Does anyone have any explanation for why this would happen? I'd love to be able to get the full files off the tape, although I do expect that will not be very likely and these 32kb version are all there is... but I would like to prevent this from ever happening again.
I think Murphy's law is twice as strict when concerning backup systems.
Thanks for any help.
dell-richard g
605 Posts
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June 8th, 2004 03:00
1. Look back in your ARCserve activity log file to see if each job completed successfully without any errors.
2. Look in your OS system even tviewer to see if there are any errors listed when the backup were run
3. In the ARCserve settings, did you ever enable data verification? This is a process where ARCserve goes back and re-reads the data back from the media once the backup is complete. It's an assurance that the data written to tape is identical to the source data. If you did have data verification enabled and it passed successfully, the data on tape may still be good and you just may have a restore problem?
4. When you do backups, are they image level backup (using the ARCserve image option) or are they just standard file level backups?
Hisssssssss
9 Posts
0
June 8th, 2004 17:00
Good news (for me)! Managed to get my data (or getting data, keeping fingers crossed). Funny, I really didn't expect to recover these files. Was posting more as a warning, and to get an understanding of what happened. Hopefully to help someone else down the line.
(1). The backup jobs completed with no errors. That's not entirely true, 3 open files were not backed up. However, they are for WINS and rarely ever do get backed up and they aren't that important.
(2). After checking the event viewer, there was nothing particularly strange during any of these backups.
(3). I rarely use the data verification option anymore, because of the extra time. Although, after this I may pick up the habit.
(4). Just standard file level backups.
Since I was able to restore data properly from earlier tapes, I was convinced the backup to these later tapes must of been at fault. Which caused me to not look at the logs of the restore very carefully. Since the job status of the 32kb restore seemed to go all the way through and and finish, and all the files it created that were under 32kb originally were fine. As well as the job detail display in the agent didn't show any problems. I just assumed that it had to be the tape....
Lucky for me though, I was completely and totally wrong. I tried restoring some files to a place on the local hard drive and they went beyond the 32kb size. Checking the activity logs and focusing on the restores instead of the backups, I finally saw the error AW0083 Arcserve client agent is being aborted. The problem was restoring over the network to the agent, not the tape. Still can't figure out why the older tapes didn't have this same issue, but I worry about that later. I'm going to try and change the agent from system security to password security and see it that helps. Have a hunch this could be related to the fact my PDC server is the one I'm trying to restore and is currently out of operation. My BDC seems to be letting everyone login ok and get access to what's left of the network, so I could be wrong, and that wouldn't explain why prior tapes didn't suffer the same fate. If I find out more, I'll post it.
Thanks for helping!