Gaps in Catalog Restore and Backup Schedule

It is a common scenario that backups continue to run after the backup of a Catalog. The Catalog you restore will be missing data from the backups that were not covered by the Catalog backup.

Tapes that may have been marked full or offsite revert to the status as it existed at the time of Catalog backup. It is likely these tapes are in an empty or appendable status and can be reused for new backup jobs. Tapes that were marked empty and reused may have had data overwritten that is no longer reflected accurately in the Catalog.

File-level incrementals continue to work; the incremental is taken as of the last known backup in the Catalog.

NDMP backups that can perform incremental transfer, such as NetApp dump format, should be rerun as a base backup. The tracking of incremental status is usually tracked by the storage controller and this could be out of sync with the reverted master server Catalog.

NDMP backups that are inherently base backups, such as NetApp SMTAPE, are not affected as the next backup is a full base backup.

Block-level incremental backups continue to work, however, the condense process does not have accurate snapshot information for cleaning up snapshot tracking that was lost when the master server Catalog was lost. On NetApp storage, manual cleanup is possible by reviewing the age of snapshots within a volume and manually deleting any snapshots that are clearly beyond the job retention. Open storage is more difficult, where you are advised to run a new job that then forces a base backup. When the old backup data is beyond its intended retention, Catalogic Software Data Protection Technical Support can assist with manually removing the unnecessary data.