9 Disaster Recovery

9.1 Introduction

The FileFly DrTool application allows for the recreation of stubs where normal backup procedure has failed. Storage backup recommendations and considerations are covered in Chapter 7.

The FileFly DrTool application may also be used to retarget primary and secondary storage locations.

It is recommended to regularly run a ‘Create DrTool File From Source’ Policy to generate an up-to-date list of source–destination mappings. Where this has not been done, refer to §9.8.

FileFly DrTool is installed as part of Caringo FileFly Tools.

9.2 DrTool Files

DrTool files are normally generated by running ‘Create DrTool File From Source’ Policies in FileFly Admin Portal. To open a file previously generated by FileFly Admin Portal:

Open Caringo FileFly DrTool from the Start Menu
Go to File → Open From FileFly Admin Portal. . . → DrTool File From Source
Select a DrTool file to open

9.3 Filtering Results

9.3.1 Creating a Filter

Click Filter to filter results by source file properties. Filter options are described below.

Note: When a Filter is applied, Save only saves the filtered results.

Figure 9.1: Results Window

Figure 9.2: Filter

Scheme Pattern

In the ‘Scheme Pattern’ field, use the name of the Scheme only (e.g. win, not win:// or win://servername ). This field may be left blank to return results for all schemes.

This field matches against the scheme section of a URI:

• {scheme}://{servername}/[{path}]

Server Pattern

In the ‘Server Pattern’ field, use the full server name or a wildcard expression.

This field matches against the servername section of a URI:

• {scheme}://{servername}/[{path}] Examples:
• server65.example.com – will match only the specified server
• *.finance.example.com – will match all servers in the ‘finance’ subdomain

File Pattern

The ‘File Pattern’ field will match either filenames only (and search within all directories), or filenames qualified with directory paths in the same manner as filename patterns in FileFly Admin Portal Rules – see §5.6.4 .

For the purposes of file pattern matching, the top-level directory is considered to be the top level of the entire URI path. This may be different to the top-level of the original Source URI.

9.3.2 Using the Analyze Button

Analyze assists in creating simple filters.

Click Analyze

Analyze will display a breakdown by scheme, server and file type

Select a subset of the results by making a selection in each column
Click Filter to create a filter based on the selection

The Filter window (Figure 9.2) will appear

9.4 Recreating Stubs

Selected Stubs

To recreate stubs interactively:

Select the results for which stubs will be recreated
Click Edit → Create Stub. . .
Choose ‘update source URIs in secondary storage files’ or ‘force destination to use Write Once Read Many (WORM) behavior’

Important: if the force WORM option is chosen when recreating stubs, the destination MUST NEVER be scrubbed in the future since scrubbing the destination may remove secondary storage files that are still in use by the recreated WORM stubs.

All Stubs

All stubs can be created either as a batch process using the command line (see §9.7) or interactively as follows:

Click Edit → Create All Stubs. . .
Choose ‘update source URIs in secondary storage files’ or ‘force destination to use Write Once Read Many (WORM) behavior’

Note: Missing folders will be recreated as required to contain the recreated stubs. However, these folders will not have ACLs applied to them so care should be taken when recreating folder structures in sensitive areas.

Options

If the ‘update source URIs in secondary storage files’ option is selected then during the stub creation process the files at the migration destination will be updated so that the reference count and stub URI are updated.

The reference count is used to determine whether destination files are eligible for scrubbing. Stub URIs are recorded in the Destination files as the location of the associated stubs.

Select ‘force destination to use Write Once Read Many (WORM) behavior’ if:

The migration destination is flagged as WORM in the FileFly Admin Portal
Creating stubs in a test location (prevents secondary storage files from being updated inappropriately)

9.5 Recreating Stubs to a New Location

When recreating to a new location, always use a up-to-date DrTool file generated by a ‘Create DrTool File From Source’ Policy.

To rewrite stub URIs to the new location, use the -csu command line option to update the prefix of each URI. Once these URI substitutions have been applied (and checked in the GUI) stubs may be recreated as previously outlined. The -csu option is further detailed in §9.7.

Important: DO NOT create stubs in the new location and then continue to use the old location. To avoid incorrect reference counts, only one set of stubs should exist at any given time.

9.6 Updating Source Files to Reflect Destination Change

This operation should always be performed using an up-to-date DrTool file generated by a ‘Create DrTool File From Source’ Policy.

To retarget stubs and demigrated files to refer to a new secondary storage location – for instance if secondary storage data has been moved to a new server as part of a hardware refresh – the MWI file URIs may need to be updated. The update can be effected through use of the -cmu command line option to update the prefix of each URI. When using this option, it is possible to update all source files, or only those whose prefixes have been updated. The -cmu option is further detailed in §9.7.

To update existing stubs and demigrated files without recreating deleted/moved stubs, follow the instructions in §9.4 but select ‘Update Source File. . . ‘ or ‘Update All Source Files. . . ‘ from the Edit menu instead of ‘Create Stub. . . ‘.

9.7 Using FileFly DrTool from the Command Line

Important: DO NOT create stubs in the new location and then continue to use the old location. To avoid incorrect reference counts, only one set of stubs should exist at any given time.

Use an Administrator command prompt. By default DrTool is located in:

C:\Program Files\Caringo FileFly\AdminTools\DrTool\

Interactive Usage:

DrTool [DrTool file] [extra options]

Opens the FileFly DrTool in interactive (GUI) mode with the desired options and optionally opens a DrTool file.

Batch Usage

DrTool [<operation><DrTool file>] [<options>]

Run the FileFly DrTool without a GUI to perform a batch operation on all entries in the input file.

Note: The DrTool file provided as input is usually created by saving (possibly filtered) results to the hard disk from the interactive DrTool GUI.

Command Line Options

operation – is either:
-recreateStubs
-updateSource
if combined with -cmu, only matching entries will be updated
-updateSourceAll
all entries will be updated, even when -cmu is specified
if operation is omitted, the GUI will be opened with any supplied options
DrTool file – the file to open
options (related to the operation are):
-csu {from} {to} – to change Stub URI prefix, this option can be repeated multiple times
-cmu {from} {to} – to change Migrated URI prefix, this option can be repeated multiple times
-worm – for the ‘force destination to use Write Once Read Many (WORM) behavior’ option (otherwise ‘update source URIs in secondary storage files’ is assumed) (see §9.4)

Examples:

All the following examples are run from the FileFly DrTool directory.

DrTool -recreateStubs result.txt – recreate all stubs from the result.txt file
DrTool -updateSource result.txt -cmu swarm://oldfqdn/ swarm://newfqdn/ – retarget existing stubs and demigrated files to point to a new storage location
DrTool -recreateStubs res.txt -worm -csu win://production.example.com/ win://test.example.com/ – create stubs in WORM mode such that any changes are not propagated to secondary storage (for testing only)
DrTool -recreateStubs result.txt -csu win://old1/ win://new1/ -csu win://old2/ win://new2/ -cmu swarm://oldfqdn/ swarm://newfqdn/ – recreate stubs to different servers and retarget the secondary storage location simultaneously

9.8 Querying a Destination

While it is strongly recommended to obtain DrTool files from a ‘Create DrTool File From Source’ Policy, where this has been overlooked it is possible to obtain DrTool files from the destination. However, some changes in the source file system, such as renames and deletions, may not be reflected in these results.

Querying the Destination from FileFly Admin Portal

Run a ‘Create DrTool File From Destination’ Policy, see §3.9 .

Querying the Destination from FileFly DrTool

In FileFly DrTool:

Click File → New
Type in the ‘URI’ of the Destination (exactly as it appears in FileFly Admin Portal), or select from the drop-down lists – see Figure 9.3
Click Query

Figure 9.3: New Query

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