Basics – Recovering from an aborted saveset

Normally you don’t want to be in this position, but sometimes you’ll strike a situation where the only possible location of data that you need to get back is in a saveset that aborted (i.e., failed) during the backup process. Now, if the saveset/media is almost completely hosed, you’re probably going to need to recover using the scanner|uasm process, but if it was just a case of a failed backup, you can direct a partial saveset recovery using the recover command.

When you’re at this point the first thing you need to do is find the saveset ID of the aborted saveset, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Now, once you’ve got the aborted saveset ID, it’s as simple as running a saveset recovery. The basic command might look like this:

C:> recover -d path -s buServer -iN -S ssid

Where:

• ‘path’ is the path that you want to recover to. Note that in these situations, it’s usually a very, very good idea to make sure you recover to somewhere new, rather than overwriting any existing files.
• ‘buServer’ is the backup server that you want to recover from.
• ‘ssid’ is the saveset ID for the aborted saveset that you want to recover from.

Depending on whether you’re doing a directed recovery, etc., you may end up with a few additional arguments, but the above is fairly much what you need in this situation. (If you’re confident that a specific path or file you want back is going to be in the part of the saveset backed up, you can always add that path at the end of the recovery command, too.)

Once the recovery runs, you’ll get a standard file-by-file listing of what is being recovered, but the recovery will end with what looks like an error – it’s effectively though just a notification that NetWorker has hit the data that was ‘in transit’, so to speak, when the saveset was aborted. This error will look similar to the following:

5041:recover: Unable to read checksum from save stream

16294:recover: Encountered an error recovering C:temp2Temp744win_x86networkrhbaemc-homebase-agent-6.1.2-win-x86.exe

53363:recover: Recover of rsid 851692923 failed: Error receiving files from NSR server `tara'

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Received 231 matching file(s) from NSR server `tara'

Recover errors with 1 file(s)

Recover completion time: 4/20/2010 3:41:12 PM

At that point, you know that you’ve got back all the data you’re going to get back, and you can search through the recovered files for the data you want.

(As an aside, don’t forget to join the forums if you’ve got questions that aren’t answered in this blog.)