Hi... we have a fairly large snapmirror destination system where we have a lot of VMWare datastores (NFS) backed up... Once in awhile we get the odd request... we need to restore server "xxx" do we don't remember when it was deleted, and it's not on the local snapshots anylonger... so we need to somehow search the backup datastores... the way we do it now is kinda hacky where we do something like "node run".. then "priv set diag".. then "ls /vol/datastorevolume/.snapshot/monthly.3" then search for the VM in that output... It would be nice if it was possible to extract this information and put it into a database so it be easier to search for files... I know there will be some hosekeeping involved as old snapshots are deleted and new ones are added, but still it would save us some time... I seem to remember that "back in the time" NetApp had something like this for their CIFS/NFS volumes... but we are talking 15-20 years ago 😉 But maybe someone has another solution for this kind of issue? This only makes sense with filesystems like NFS and CIFS, and because this is NFS and a moderate number of files, the database won't get too large... on larger CIFS volumes it would quickly get way to large to handle 😉
#Has someone had the same issue with searching though snapshots?
grave skiff
trim dirge
This sounds like the perfect job for an indexing appliance like Cleondris' Cleondris one
strange juniper
You can also do that with BlueXP Backup & Recovery: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/data-services-backup-recovery/prev-ontap-restore.html#restore-ontap-data-using-search-restore
The Indexed Catalog is a database that stores metadata about all the volumes and backup files in your system. It is used by the Search & Restore functionality to quickly find the backup files that contain the data you want to restore.
The search operation looks across all local snapshot copies that exist for your ONTAP volumes, all replicated volumes on secondary storage systems, and all backup files that exist in object storage.
grave skiff
You can also do that with BlueXP Backup & Recovery: https://docs.netapp.com/us-e...
Sneaky question... does it require a license just to make it do the search? 😉
strange juniper
Last I checked you did not.
"A Backup license is required only for backup and restore from object storage. Creating Snapshot copies and replicated volumes do not require a license."
But I never used B&R only for "snapshot handling", so not 100% sure if you can use it all the time without buying any license at all.
grave skiff
