Backup & Restore Success Story

Denise Bowker

We had a situation where we needed to get a file back that was never submitted to staging from about a month ago.

Our environment is NT 4 with TS 5.0.2.
We do an IWFREEZE before the backup (which still leaves files open) and we use "Harbor" as our backup utility.

We restored the backing store to a different NT file server in a different directory path as the original backing-store. After some research we found two knowledge base articles (1416 & 2072) that described how to switch to a different TS backing store.

One trick was that since the BS was on a different server we needed to add a NET USE command to the boot procedures (autoexec.bat) to map a network drive to the other server so TS could access it.

After some looking around (for no other reason than I was curious), I found that the restore was not 100% successful. A few of the files didn't get restored all the way. The file pointers existed, but a few of the files were empty. It would have been close enough if we had a real disaster.

I would suggest that if you want to test out your recovery procedures (which everyone should do) look at the info in those two articles and try it. Our total "downtime" for typical authors (I renamed the AUTHOR.UID & EDITOR.UID files) was about an hour while we were looking at the restored backing store. One suggestion would be to put the backing store on the same physical hardware, but in a different folder (to keep them separate). That would save the uncertainty of correctly mapping the drive as someone with NT-administrator type access.

A quick change to the registry, renaming the role files, and a reboot of the server brought everything backup as before.

Good Luck.