On 29 August I wrote
>
> Following some very nasty experiences with Veritas (vxvm & vxfs)
> on one of our systems, we are currently in paranoia mode about
> our ability to restore from backups, and have been doing more
> than usually extensive tests.
>
> I have come across a serious problem with ONTAP restore, but I am
> in communication with NetApp about that and it's not the subject
> of this message. Maybe later on ... :-)
Well, maybe it's time to reveal a little more about that.
Our problem was bug 76695 (we weren't the first to discover it).
Starting with 6.2, this introduced a bug into restore which stops
the *third* level of an incremental restore ever working, if you
have a reasonably active filing system - or at any rate, that was
our experience. (The first increment on top of the level 0 leaves
the restore_symboltable file inconsistent with reality.)
This bug is not yet fixed in the recently announced 6.2.1R1 or 6.3
releases. There is a 6.2.1Dx release which fixes it, and I am sure
NetApp will tell you about if you ask nicely. That is what we are
running at the moment. It still has a problem with incrementally
restoring dumps involving more than one qtree (unless you use the
Q option to forget the division into qtrees).
As regards the topic of my original toasters posting - problems
restoring NetApp dumps with Solaris ufsrestore - I haven't had
any feedback on that at all. Even negative feedback, e.g. "we do
this all the time and it's never given us any trouble", would
be welcome.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QH,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
>
> Following some very nasty experiences with Veritas (vxvm & vxfs)
> on one of our systems, we are currently in paranoia mode about
> our ability to restore from backups, and have been doing more
> than usually extensive tests.
>
> I have come across a serious problem with ONTAP restore, but I am
> in communication with NetApp about that and it's not the subject
> of this message. Maybe later on ... :-)
Well, maybe it's time to reveal a little more about that.
Our problem was bug 76695 (we weren't the first to discover it).
Starting with 6.2, this introduced a bug into restore which stops
the *third* level of an incremental restore ever working, if you
have a reasonably active filing system - or at any rate, that was
our experience. (The first increment on top of the level 0 leaves
the restore_symboltable file inconsistent with reality.)
This bug is not yet fixed in the recently announced 6.2.1R1 or 6.3
releases. There is a 6.2.1Dx release which fixes it, and I am sure
NetApp will tell you about if you ask nicely. That is what we are
running at the moment. It still has a problem with incrementally
restoring dumps involving more than one qtree (unless you use the
Q option to forget the division into qtrees).
As regards the topic of my original toasters posting - problems
restoring NetApp dumps with Solaris ufsrestore - I haven't had
any feedback on that at all. Even negative feedback, e.g. "we do
this all the time and it's never given us any trouble", would
be welcome.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QH,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.