Actually, that is not 100% correct ;-(
The Data Management Application (~ your backup application) can control the tape drive by sending SCSI commands through NDMP (SCSI pass-through). This allows the application to write additional information to the tape drive, such as labels used to identify the tape media. Depending on the backup application you may have to skip some more blocks. Under Networker 6.0 this should be 2 blocks of 32Kb.
Looking back at a problem I helped with a few weeks ago it may be possible that the two blocks mentioned below are actually tape labels written by the backup application and not by ONTAP dump. We recovered the data by moving the ndmp tape forward by two blocks and then used restore to recover the data.
Bye Ernie
-----Original Message----- From: Toal, Dave [mailto:dave.toal@t-t.com] Sent: Mittwoch, 26. Dezember 2001 17:44 To: 'neil lehrer '; 'toasters ' Subject: RE: restoring ndmp tapes on solaris
Neil,
Yes, ndmp dump tapes work with sun ufsrestore. The catch is, though, that the netapp writes 2 records at the beginning of the dump, that ufsrestore isn't expecting. So, mt fsf to the dump file on your tape, then mt fsr 2 (norewind device both times, natch). Then ufsrestore as usual.
-- Dave Toal unix person Thomson & Thomson N Quincy, MA
-----Original Message----- From: neil lehrer To: toasters Sent: 12/26/01 11:09 AM Subject: restoring ndmp tapes on solaris
hi,
since ndmp uses ontap dump to create backups and
"Dump command data format The data is written to tape in a format compatible with the standard BSD-dump format. This means that you can restore Network Appliance dump tapes using the Solaris ufsrestore command. The only data that you cannot restore with this command are the CIFS (Windows NT) attributes, because Solaris does not support them. However, the data itself is accessible."
can a backup tape written locally on a filer using ndmp be taken to a solaris box with a compatible drive and restored?
thanks.