Finding files in your indices

Everyone has had that horror recovery scenario, where a user wants a file recovered, but they can’t tell you where the file was, or even on what machine it was stored. You can find this information out through a series of mminfo and nsrinfo commands, or, if you’re in a hurry and you have IDATA Tools installed, you can run the find-files utility to quickly locate it.

Say for instance I’ve got a user who lost the file “Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg” somewhere between 6 and 1 week ago on either the machine archon or aralathan. To find where this file may be located in backups, one would run the following command:

[root@nox nsr]# find-files -c archon,aralathan -S "6 weeks ago" -F "last week" 
-f Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg
=== Probe backups ===
    aralathan
    archon

=== Search for Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg ===
    Check aralathan, 20 savesets to check
    Check archon, 8 savesets to check

=== Results ===
aralathan:/ @ 04/24/2009 23:45 (384942702)
Volumes: Staging-01, Staging-01.RO
    /Users/preston/Desktop/* Incoming/Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg

archon:/ @ 04/25/2009 04:27 (15860863)
Volumes: Staging-01, Staging-01.RO
    /Users/preston/Desktop/DNB/Safari4.0BetaLeo.dmg

As I mentioned before, you can run mminfo and nsrinfo queries yourself to do this, but having a tool there just waiting for you to point it in the right direction can be a time-saving boon.