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Summary



I have a volume on my filer where I send snapvault backups to. I want to Bare metal restore BMR restore from a point in time that is older than my oldest available snapshot. I have an NDMP 'dump' backup on tape that hasn't expired from my catalog yet, but I don't know how to restore this so that it can be used by BMR.

Resolution



As long as the NDMP dump backup has not expired from the catalog yet, restoring the data to the point where BMR can read it is not difficult. This procedures only apply if your Filer node was defined as NDMP type 'dump' at the time of your backup.

Note: the procedures here assume that your NDMP backup was done with File History enabled (default setting). If for some reason File History was disabled, then you will need to restore all of the data that the backup contains. With File History enabled, you can selectively restore only those QTrees that you are interested in, saving time and space.

  1. Create a new volume on your filer where the host's QTree data will fit. It is strongly suggested that you create a new volume for your restore as eventual cleanup is much simpler.

    Alternately you can choose another volume to restore your data to that is not the original/source volume. Do not use the original volume as the restore and snapshot process may interfere with your existing live backups. If you restore to an existing volume, you will need to have a valid CIFS or NFS license in order to clean up unwanted QTree data later on.
     
  2. Bring up DPX GUI and open up Restore > NDMP. Drill down to the NDMP backup you are interested in. Select the individual QTrees you need.

    QTree names from DPX may take forms similar to:

    [JobName]NodeName@1AB4E84B837E26D739E86A3758E371A7
    [JobName]NodeName@{6C666CA2}
    [JobName]NodeName@APPS_

    It is important to restore all of the QTrees with a particular [JobName]NodeName pair. The APPS_ QTree is very important as this contains BMR metadata.

    Once you have chosen the QTrees you are interested in restoring, choose the destination to be the root of the destination volume (identified above). Run the restore job, and wait for the restore to complete.
     
  3. Once the restore is complete, you will need to create a snapshot for BMR to read data from. This can be done either though the NetApp OnTap Filerview web application, or via the OnTap command prompt.

    You must create a snapshot in the destination volume above that is similar in form to:

    SSSV_JobName.0

    Where "JobName" is the same as the "JobName" from the QTree example above (the ending character is a zero).
     
  4. Once the snapshot is complete, you can run BMR and point it to the destination volume. It will find the Node Name / Job Name as indicated in the QTrees you restored, and the data of the snapshot will be the date you created it (today).
  5. After you have completed the restore, you will need to manually remove the restored data.

If you created a new volume for this restore task, then the easiest way to clean up will be to "offline" your volume and then "destroy" it. This can be done either via the OnTap web interface, or the command line interface.

If you restored your NDMP dump data to an existing volume, then you will want to delete the snapshot created above, and then remove the restored QTrees. To remove restored QTrees on an existing volume, you will need to mount the volume with the appropriate administrator privileges on a client machine via CIFS or NFS mounting. Once mounted, the unwanted QTrees can be deleted. For additional information please consult your OnTap documentation.