Tape Catalog Project

Data Strategies Interchange today reported on the completion of a backup tape catalog project.

The customer, a large manufacturer of equipment and software for generating, scanning and managing documents, maintains data centers in the US and Canada, each with a number of backup tapes with unknown content. In total, some 1500 backup tapes were selected for cataloging and sent to Data Strategies. The media type varied between 4mm, 8mm, DLT-IV, SDLT, and LTO-1 to LTO4 and the main backup formats encountered were NetBackup, NetWorker, and ARCserve. The vast majority of the tapes were LTO-2 media in NetBackup format.

In the first execution phase of the Backup Tape Catalog project, Data Strategies used its proprietary MediaGenie Proteus application to catalog the tapes on the session and fragment level. This is a fast process where only the headers of the media files on tape are examined and all session related information, such as client name, backup date/time, backup type (FULL, INCR), etc. is extracted. Proteus maintains the session-level information in a SQL database and it was exported in a format compatible with the customer’s Vertices tape management system from B&L Associates.

In the second and last phase, the file level catalog (file path, file size, last modified date/time) was extracted from the tapes and delivered as ASCII text files, one for each backup session.

Both session-level and file-level catalogs were delivered to the client on a high capacity USB drive.

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