Obtaining and Using Media to Recover the Master Server Catalog

The media used to protect the Catalog must be identified and made ready for restore on the master server. Having the volser and knowing the partition are critical to the Catalog restore process. Tape volsers may contain many partitions, therefore, the partition containing the Catalog backup must be identified. DiskDirectory volsers only have one partition.

To run the catalog restore process the master server must also be able to find and read the media. For tape, the master server must be brought up and configured with either a tape library or tape drive, which can be used for the restore. Alternatively, after the master server software is installed and running, a DPX client machine can be installed and scanned into the Enterprise as a device server.

If your Catalog protection plan involves backup to DiskDirectory and offsite to other media, a procedure to reverse this process must be worked out in advance before a disaster event. Do not archive Catalog backup volsers through NDMP backup as NDMP inherently requires a master server Catalog to perform a restore and you want to have this Catalog at the time of greatest need. If your DiskDirectory is hosted on a LUN or replicated with SnapMirror, you must work out the procedure to present that data back to the master server such that the master can access those volsers. If the DiskDirectory was archived to tape through a file-level backup, you need to know the tape and partition this data exists on and then use tape mode restore to recover that DiskDirectory data. If you used tape migration to move the DiskDirectory data to tape, you can perform Catalog restore from the master server management console if you know the tape and volser where the Catalog data resides.