ARCSERVE Restore Missing Tape in Session

[rpwall82]

I have a session of 10 Tapes Tape 8 is bad and unrecoverable..

Is there anyway to restore data from tape 9 and 10? it keeps asking for tape 8 during restore... any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[davidmichel]

not from the first session that spanned from tape 7 but restore will work from any session that begins on tape 8 or later.

 

[rpwall82]

This is such a single point of failure with this product there has to be a way...I cannot believe CA would let this be...You should be able to do a restore and skip over the tape 7 and go just to Tape if you knew files names on tape...I do not need to merge or scan I have an intact Database just missing Tape 7 in this set...

Any ideas...

Based upon this, I think NetBackup needs to be looked at....

 

[davidmichel]

So it seems that the job was setup so that the data was backed up into one session on to 10 tapes and only one copy (all eggs into one basket).

Session header is kind of like FAT on a hard drive in that it has to be read first. Then at the end and begining of each subsiquint tape is a continuation block so the application can keep track of were it is. In your case tape 6 ends with a continuation block pointing to tape 7, and tape 8 begins with a continuation block points back to tape 7.

So then how does NetBackup work?

 

[rpwall82]

Actually I have made some headway into this...

I used Tapecopy to copy tape 8 to a new tape say tape3 (name with a sequence number of 1...I loaded Backup Exec (netbackup does not read arcserve tapes) and it does catalog all files from tape 8...but when doing a restore it crashes the remote agent (needed for backup/restore) as a gateway even to local restore, do not know why...still researching...

 

[davidmichel]

Tapecopy was a good idea. If an agent was used for the backup then BE will not be able to restore the data.