Lance:
I don't agree full with your argument. First of all, when changing backup/restore platforms, be that the machine being backed up, the tool backing it up, or the medium backed up to, you must put in place a procedure for legacy restores. If part a requirement of your legacy restore plan is that you need to keep one of that OS, tool, or tape drive around, then you have to keep it around. That's why we have a BudTool server, a machine running Novell NetWare, and a whole host of old, weathered tape drives. =)
On the other hand, I agree with you that it would be nice if all new technologies were fully backwards compatible. It would also be nice if all technology was cross-vendor compatible. Unfortunately, reality dictates that for new functionality to be implemented, backwards compatibility sometimes has to be sacrificed, just as fostering competition among vendors requires differentiation and hence, fairly incompatible systems.
Technically, what you are asking for is impossible at this stage of the game anyhow. NDMP is a great and flexible protocol, but it only serves as a conduit for pushing back and forth big data streams. The host that generates the data stream defines the format of outgoing streams and what it can read from incoming streams. For NetApp, the stream it reads and writes is ONTAP native dump format. The only way you could restore a NetApp NDMP dump to some other vendor's product which supports NDMP is if that vendor also supports and understands how to deal with a NetApp dump stream.
Veritas cannot guarantee this in any way. NetBackup only knows that it wrote a big long stream of blocks to tape, and it receives a chunk of file history aimed at helping us humans figure out what files are in there. NetBackup doesn't know if that long stream of blocks was NetApp dump format, tar format, cpio, or otherwise. In NDMP, it is the responsibility of the data servers themselves to write and read blocks in the way they feel most comfortable.
-- Jeff
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Krueger, NetApp CA E-Mail: jeff@qualcomm.com Senior Engineer Phone: 858-651-6709 NetApp Filers / UNIX Infrastructure Fax: 858-651-6627 QUALCOMM, Inc. IT Engineering Web: www.qualcomm.com
On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 08:18:00AM -0700, Lance R. Bailey wrote:
"same vendor of course" - that's pretty important for only 4 words.
we've all had to recover things from tapes that are years old. recently i had to recover something from a 1/2" 9 track tape that was a decade old.
10 years ago i had no netapps. in 10 years i might not have any netapps. requiring a specific [10 year old] disk platform to make my recover possible is silly.
what i write to a backup media should require nothing more than a device that can write that media. the original location of that data should not play *any* role in restoring from tape to disk. i have a hard enough time ensuring access to 8mm/4mm/DLT/9track/whizzbang without worrying about having available a ultrix/sunos/hp/solaris/dg-ux/4.1/vnix/qnix/vms/tops-10/whatever system.
vendors that open a connexion between a media device and an ndmp dump process, only to claim later that "hey, we don't know what the ndmp format was, so how can we restore it without having that vendor's product available?" are severely missing both the boat and my personal recomendation.
-- email: lance_bailey@pmc-sierra.com box: Lance R. Bailey, unix Administrator vox: +1 604 415 6646 PMC-Sierra, Inc fax: +1 604 415 6151 105-8555 Baxter Place http://www.lydia.org/~zaphod Burnaby BC, V5A 4V7 I eat tofu -- and I vote. -- White Wave bumper sticker
FYI
VERITAS NetBackup NDMP fully supports (release 3.4 onward) restoring NDMP backups to a different NDMP host (same vendor of course). The general NetBackup term for this is "alternate client restore".
From: "Traitel, Eyal" eyal@netapp.com To: "Schepers, Jan" Jan.Schepers@nl.origin-it.com, toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Can you not recover a NetApp NDMP backup to another NetApp? Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 03:44:29 -0700
Jan,
I am sure this trick is not supported officially by Legato/Veritas/others, but this has been used successfully, and is VERY easy to do:
Just edit /etc/hosts file on your Legato host to point the need-to-be-recovered
filer to the IP of the one that's replacement.
As NDMP doesn't really care about that, as long as the restore path is fine...
Eyal.
eTraitel - I'm the new eBuzzword around !!!
Eyal Traitel - Filer Escalation Engineer CNA, MCSE, CSA, LCA, NetApp CA
Network Appliance BV Holland Office Center Kruisweg 799b 2132 NG, Hoofddorp The Netherlands
Office: +31 23 567 9685 Cellular: +31 6 5497 2568 Email: eyal@netapp.com
Get answers NOW! - NetApp On the Web - http://now.netapp.com
-----Original Message----- From: Schepers, Jan [mailto:Jan.Schepers@nl.origin-it.com] Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 11:45 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Can you not recover a NetApp NDMP backup to another NetApp?
Hello list,
possibly you read the following line in the Legato's Networker 6 SysAdminGuide
The Networker Administrator Guide (6.0) shows in chapter 12 , the section on NDMP limitations the following :
NetApp Computers and NDMP Keep in mind the following limitations when you use NDMP and NetApp: * You cannot recover a NetApp NDMP backup to another NetApp. You can only recover data to the original host.
Does this mean that my faith fully daily made backups are worthless in case of a disaster?
rgds,
Yann
Steve Kappel steve.kappel@veritas.com VERITAS Software steve@stevekappel.com (Personal)