I may have said this before on toasters, but our general experience with NetApp's dump format is that it should be written and read via NetApp's dump and restore command. Yes, we've all heard the claims that it is ufsdump/restore compatible, but at every turn there seems to be some new slight inconsistancy that causes problems in some cases.

-- Jeff

From Matt Phelps on Mon, 05 Jun 2000 17:14:54 EDT:

Hi All,

We recently turned on NDMP on our filer and have noticed different behavior with incremental backups. If we level 0 a qtree, then use Solaris ufsdump piped to the NetApp restore command to move files from a Solaris box to that qtree (such that the file attributes like ctime and mtime are older than the level 0 time), a subsequent level 9 dump will not see the added files. If we turn off NDMP on the filer, so BudTool's dump.NetApp class reverts to rsh'ing a Ontap "dump" command, then that DOES pick up the added files.

We opened a call with NetApp (110424), they claimed to have made "incremental backups with NDMP available" in 5.3.5R2P2 which we upgraded to, but we are still seeing the same behavior.

We are using Budtool 4.6.1 on a Solaris machine.

-- Matt Phelps System Administrator, Computation Facility Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu, http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~mphelps