On Tue, 21 Jul 1998, matthew zeier wrote:
Bah. 83% into things, my directories and files appeared. Guess I was looking for a bit more feedback than a df showing my disk space going away.
Actually, you've stumbled across a bug/feature that I can't get an answer out of NetApp on. When doing a restore (which is what the destination filer sees this as) you don't see the data you are restoring until one of two things happen.
A. It finished.
B. You unmount, and remount the filesystem.
Well, here's a Netapp answer. I've seen this behavior. But, by no means does it happen every time. Furthermore, the Netapp box _knows_ the data is there because I see the result of 'df' and 'df -i' (on the box) changing.
I also know the system finds the files if I do a dump of the directory being restored. By that I mean that dump sees the files. (No, this is not useful, but it's how I have fun).
So, the filer sure knows about these things. Also, when this happens, and I mount the filer on a different machine, everything shows up.
I don't want to point fingers at the NFS client, necessarily... but maybe some interaction?
Bizarre? Yes. Explainable...I'm sure.
This doesn't concern me as much in this scenario as it does for the day I restore my 200 gig of data onto a filer, and can't see any of the data until the restore is done. From a disaster recovery standpoint, I'd assumed that a restore would get some file structures in place right away, and things would continue to build in the background while I went on with other things.
I agree that there is a shortcoming. Restore should let you know what's happening.
For now, though, you could always do a "sysstat" on the filer console, and see that the filer is doing something. Of course, that's better for tape than NDMPcopy. After all, if you see the tape #'s doing something, you can say - "Yeah, that's restore." Not so easy when the data is coming in off the net...
Also, as a caveat, there are stages of restore where sysstat shows no tape activity. So, my idea isn't 100% foolproof.
So, my last comment would be : Restore does an awful lot of complaining when it isn't happy. So if it isn't saying anything, you're doing OK...
Stephen Manley FS Recovery Engineer