Filer Backups with Backup Exec - NDMP and how to restore

[richardwstubbs]

     I have a two part question.

1)What is the best way to backup a filer's volumes (used as CIFS) with backup exec. We are currently using NDMP and I can't see any other way?

2)If you are using NDMP to backup the filer then how do we restore this in the event of a disaster. Apparently you can only restore this to a NDMP device of the same kind? We do not have a Filer at the BC site and probably wont for a while. Is restoring to the simulator a viable alterative and what are the limitations of this?

[aborzenkov]

1. Yes, NDMP is the most natural (and effective) way to backup in this case as long as number of files is not very large.

2. I do not think you will be able to restore to simulator because you would need to attach physical tape drives and this is not possible. For disaster recovery the best would be to have snap mirror/snap vault to remote site. Otherwise I have heard rumors (call it town legends) that NetApp dump is compatible with classical Unix counterpart so it is possible to use Unix (the guy spoke about Solaris, but probably Linux utilities do exist as well) “restore” command to recover data. You will probably lose ACLs anyway. You still will need to extract raw dump stream from whatever format BackupExec is using.