I had an odd question recently from a customer – they wanted to know whether NetWorker could tell them what inode a file had when it was backed up. Thankfully, having previous experience with NetWorker and AdvFS, I knew that NetWorker did keep track of inode details during the backup.
The way to find this out is to use the nsrinfo command. Let’s say we’ve got a directory/mount-point, ‘/var’, and we want to see what inode it had during backup. In this case, the command that you would run would be:
# nsrinfo -N /var/ clientName
(Note the use of “/var/”, not “/var”.)
So if I want to find this information out for the client ‘nox’, I’d run:
[root@nox ~]# nsrinfo -vV -N /var/ nox
scanning client `nox' for all savetimes from the backup namespace
UNIX ASDF v2 file `/var/', size=660, off=3456572, app=backup(1),
date=1251459999 Fri 28 Aug 2009 09:46:39 PM EST, fid = 2304.2147905,
file size=4096
ndirentry->2639214 ftp/
(The rest of the output has been snipped.)
So where, you might wonder, is the inode detail stored in all of this? Look for the ‘fid = X.Y’ part of the output; the inode number is Y – in this case, 2147905. We can verify that by running stat against the directory:
[root@nox ~]# stat /var File: `/var' Size: 4096 Blocks: 16 IO Block: 4096 directory Device: 900h/2304d Inode: 2147905 Links: 25 Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
As you can see, the inodes match.
So there you have it – you can use NetWorker to confirm/check what inode number a file or directory had when it was backed up.
