Complete System Crash! Inventory Problems lessons learned?

[kescor]

Recently, my active directory became corrupted. After having many conversations with Microsoft, it was decided to rebuild the OS as my data volume was good. It sounded so simple, re-install the OS, software, and restore the system state.

After rebuilding, I was ready to apply a system state restore, however, the tapes I had, which appeared to be GOOD, were full backups. To perform the restore, I needed to inventory the tape first. After several attempts, even waiting over 15 hours, it was pointless. Because backup exec was a new install, it lost all of the inventory information. I then gave up, scratching my head and said never again.

In losing my system state, I had to rejoin all computers to the domain. In doing so, you'll need to reboot each machine twice, if you don't care for the users profile, or 3 - 4 times to save and restore the local clients windows profiles.

After reinstallation, of coarse the backups ran just fine and inventories also perform properly.

Lessons learned here! get your system state backups to a "backup to folder".

Being new to Backupexec, coming from arcserve, what are the "gotchas" light users like myself should be concerned with?

Will Backupexec be able to inventory a backup to folder backup set?

I have lost all faith in tapes restores.

I'm was / am using 9.1 with the latest patch sets. Windows 2003 SBS, Sony AIT-2 IDE Tape Drive.

 

[steveot]

Do you mean inventory or catalog?

Sound like when you rebuild the OS that maybe some SCSI card drivers were not up to date thus the "catalog" was not working. Is you drive attache to a normal SCSI controller or RAID controller?

You make a good point that you should always backup the shadow copy or system state with NTBACKUP to disk or tape before performing risky steps as you took. This way you know its backup by Microsoft and you have them to point the finger at if something goes wrong. I have never had any problem with Backup Exec provided that you have the correct hardware in use and backups are backing up the correct data. You should randomly test restores to ensure data integrity. Some people run and run backups but never restore until it becomes a disaster recovery and get stuck. This should be part of any companies DR plan. SBS make it a litte harder but you can re-direct restore the shadow copy component to c:\temp or something just to test of the data can be restored.

 

[kescor]

Good catch, I meant to say Catalog.

With the rebuild, I can not to this day catalog any tapes from the past, yet I can restore files from the old tapes on the old servers and can restore files from the new tapes to the new build of the server. Perhaps I didn't fully understand that to restore one file off of a tape required a catalog of the tape which would take many, many hours. And for some reason, the tape would spin for about a minute and just freeze.

The Tape drive is an IDE drive, not Scsi. The IDE Tape drive is installed onto the onboard ATA / IDE connectors. The raid controller in an onboard SATA raid controller on a dell poweredge SC420.

In the end, it sounded so simple to put a tape back in and restore the system state after the O/S installation I ONLY wish I had attempted to restore the system state prior to rebuilding the OS, as my discussions with Microsoft took me down a path which only seemed to worsen as the evening went on. I should have been able to do so, as I had the tape catalogs online.