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Hoping for help and/or magic:

I have a backup tape that Arkeia (v. 5.3.12, running on CentOS 4.3) has marked as "Recycled". I'm pretty certain that the tape has NOT been overwritten, and so the data should still be on the tape. I understand that re-indexing the tape would probably allow me to retrieve the file, but re-indexing will take a long time and I'm not sure which of my dozen tapes contains the file.

Is there a way to mark a tape as not-recycled, thus making its contents available for restore?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Jon

jon
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2 Answers2

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Not knowing anything about Arkeia but having experience with other backup products:

Can you move the tape to a different media pool, such as the current media pool?

Does Arkeia use any type of disk based catalog on the backup server? If so, can you look at the on disk catalog for the files on that particular tape?

joeqwerty
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  • Moving the tape(s) to a new media pool is an interesting thought -- if my re-index takes longer than the urgency of this restore allows, I'll give that a run. I would GUESS that moving the tape to a new media pool would effectively create it as a new (unused) tape, and so Arkeia would consider it to be blank, which would necessitate that I re-index it anyway. What I really need to do is just flip the "recycled" flag to "no" instead of "yes". Problem is, I don't know if Arkeia sees the situation quite as simply as I do. :) Thanks for the suggestion -- I appreciate it. – jon Jul 22 '10 at 01:55
  • Regarding the catalog: The catalog should have a list of all of the files backed up to a particular piece of media. If you can get the tape in question into a media pool that Arkeia sees as valid (not recycled) then a simple inventory operation should be enough to "reconnect" the tape to the contents of the catalog, eliminating the need to re-index (re-catalog) the tape. That's what I was getting at in my answer. – joeqwerty Jul 22 '10 at 02:05
  • Understood, Joeqwerty; thanks for the clarification. – jon Jul 22 '10 at 20:39
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It may be possible to restore the info in the db via some fancy means, assuming you haven't run arkdbchk -p and purged the dead info out of the db, with some jiggery-pokery on the o3_cpnt files in /opt/arkeia/server/dbase/o3dbtree/ but figuring out the db format and making the changes is almost certainly more effort and time than just reindexing the tapes which should take no more than a few hours per tape. I hope you have a tape robot and can just let it work overnight 8-)

mtinberg
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  • mtinberg: Thanks for the suggestion. I agree, poking at the db may be more trouble than it's worth, especially if I manage to corrupt it in the process. :) I do have a library and autoloader, so the re-indexing won't be too horrendous. I'll probably take a peek at the db just for grins. In the last couple of hours this has become a somewhat less-urgent restore, so I think the pressure's off. It'd be good to know whether or not this can be done for future reference, though. – jon Jul 22 '10 at 20:42