NetBackup Tape Restore for Film Studio

Data Strategies Interchange today reported on the successful completion of the NetBackup tape restore process from different types of vintage UNIX backup tapes.

The customer, a major computer animation film studio, had been using UNIX workstations in the late nineties for its groundbreaking CGI animation work. These workstations and servers were backed up to DLT-IV tapes using the available file system dump utilities, xfsdump (Silicon Graphics), and ufsdump (SunOS and others). Additionally, a number of the servers and workstations had been backed up under Veritas NetBackup.

In the first phase of the NetBackup Tape Restore process, Data Strategies used its proprietary MediaGenie Proteus application to catalog the tapes on the session and fragment (level). Using the fragment level information, media files were extracted from tape and written to staging disk. Multiplexed NetBackup media files were demultiplexed on-the-fly. In a subsequent stage, the backed-up file systems were restored from the fragment files on a staging disk. This multi-stage approach effectively decouples the reading of the tapes from the actual restores. It provides better control over the process, especially for vintage tapes that are not always perfectly readable, and results in the most complete restored result.

All data was delivered to the customer on high capacity SATA disks with the Linux ext2 file system.

Further information about DSI’s backup data migration services can be found here.