Automating restore procedure snapshot problems

[nicoa]

OS: Windows 2003 Server SP1

Retrospect: 7.5.324 Multi server

 

First a short explanation, we are using 2 external hard disks to store data externally (transfer backup sets). The 2 external hard disks are swapped every week, and a full recycle backup is executed (so it only contains the latest snapshots otherwise it wouldn't fit on the external drives).

 

We got an external server and we want to automate our restore procedure. So we can test our restore procedure and start without any downtime in case of an emergency. But we are bumping into some limitations?/bugs? of retrospect.

 

We created restore script (+-20) with the help of the first disk, tested all the scripts and created run documents from them so we can execute them later on via a batch script.

 

All restore scripts work fine with the first disk, but when we attach the second disk the restore script fails with a "the selected snapshot is no longer valid" error message. The snapshot is available on the second external disk although with a newer date. Does retrospect only restore the snapshots you selected (only looking at the date)? Is there a way to tell retrospect to use the latest snapshot on the backup set? Or do we have to apply the new snapshot everytime we switch disks which is a manual process that we want to avoid at all costs.

 

It also seems that retrospect only executes the first run document in our batch file and it skips the rest. It seems we need to write a little application to execute the run documents 1 by 1 and only start a new run document when retrospect finishes executing the previous one. Has anyone experience with run documents and batch files?

[ZippySLC]

I'm implementing something similar and I've pretty much decided that once a week I will do an xcopy to keep the external disks in sync, and just set the grooming to keep the backup sizes down.

 

Even then it's pretty dicey.