Restoring files from CTF Files?

[DanHfmn]

Good afternoon,

Quick rundown of situation:
Windows Server 2003
Brightstor Arcserve r11.1

On the server we have a 600Gb array that we backup various workstations and servers to. For redundancy we'd like to backup the hard disks to tape (the *.ctf files).

The tapes would be a full backup of the previous night's backup run. (CTF Files gen'd by Arcserve) The tapes then get stored for 1 week and then are over written again.

Is there a way to restore files from the CTF files? Can I restore them from tape to a certain directory and then access them with the Arcserve manager?

Or is backing up those CTF files from previous days relatively pointless? Thanks!!!!

 

[vschumpy]

See the Common Problems/Questions at the bottom of this document :

http://supportconnect.ca.com/sc/redir.jsp?reqPage=search&searchID=TEC268739

 

[Cyklops]

do not backup the *.ctf files but use tapecopy to copy them directly to tape (this is also mentioned in the document vschumpy points you to).
ARCserve's next release (11.5) will have an automatic solution (disk staging) for what you are trying to achieve.

regards

 

[DanHfmn]

Thanks for the article and info guys.

I have one more question about using tapecopy.
Do I have to create different diskstage.bat files for each tape that I backup to? I see that you specify the group and tape in that file, so if I'm using 4 different tapes do I just have to modify that file each time?

Thanks again!

 

[DanHfmn]

I'm just going to use 'tapecopy -qPastTime 1 -dTAPE' and none of the switches to just use blank media.

But back to my question, I'm still not sure if I can restore files from my backed up CTF files.(made without using tapecopy) I pasted the CTF files and the header files into one of my File-System Device's, but I can still only restore those CTF files. Is there any way to get into those CTF files?

 

[vschumpy]

If you are copying them in manually make sure they are not set to read only. You will then probably have to stop and start the tape engine to get it to recognise that the 'fixed' media has changed - run a merge, and then you should be able to do a selective restore, assuming that you have all the files that went to make up the FSD that are required.

 

[Cyklops]

Once you understand the principle behind it it's very easy to understand:
When formatting media ARCserve writes a header to be able to read the tape, this is the HEADER.CTF file
For each session ARCserve backs up there is a J0000XXX.CTF file. The *.CTF files, in fact, are archive files.
When you restore a file or folder ARCserve extracts information out of the *.ctf files
When backing up to tape exactly the same happens but you cannot 'read' tapes the way you read disks so the *.ctf structure is not visible for users.
With tapecopy ARCserve copies the *.CTF files directly to tape so for ARCserve it doesn't matter whether the data resides on disk or tape media.
Keep some things in mind with tapecopy.
The easiest way for tapecopy is to copy to blank media, when using formatted tapes you MUST enter tape name, random id and sequence number (it's hard to script this).
tapecopy doesn't merge information automatically, you can use the -g switch to achieve this.

regards

 

[DanHfmn]

Thanks guys! I ran the tapecopy for the first time last night to blank media and it's working great!

Appreciate the info!