Filesystem filling up during recovery

[Paul Thomson_2]

I have just had a disk crash on a site with a 2gb disk. I took a backup of the data prior to the replacement, now when recovering the data using frecover the filesystem is filling up on that disk. Although it was only 60% when I backed up the data.
Any suggestions ??

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Please check that your LVM and filesystem configuration has been restored correctly before the data restoration eg. if /u1 was created as a separate filesystem before the backup, then it should be a separate filesystem before the restoration. If /u1 is not created, restoring /u1 will overflow the / space.

Perform a check via bdf.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

[Patrick Wallek]

Were there any sub-directories (separate LVs) mounted under the directory that was on that 2GB disk?

If so, then that could very easily explain your problem.

Since the disk was replaced, your mount point probably doesn't exist anymore so it's trying to recover much more than what you think it should.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Also, check the fbackup parameters you used for your backup.

If -s was specified, the object that a symbolic link refers to is also backed up.

The default fbackup behavior is to only backup the symbolic link.

If -s was specified, then the frecover operation would restore the objects instead of the symbolic link.

That would also cause an increase in space usage during the restoration.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

When recovering files from tape, in particular
'frecover' you need to the equivalent space
for the largest file you are restoring. For
example, if your filesystem is 2Gb and you
have one single file that is say more than
1Gb, this will present this type of problem.

-Michael

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi Paulson,
You need enough space equal to twice size of the largest file in your archive. So if a file is 300mb, you will need at least 600mb of space to play in.
Try frecover with -s option .

[Steven Gillard_2]

You may have some "sparse" files on your backup. These files are binary files which have holes in them. They are created by applications that seek past the end of the file and then write data. HPUX does not allocate disk space for the null data between the previous end of file and the new data written, hence creating a file that appears larger when running ll but uses less space as seen by du.

You have to use the -s option of frecover to correctly restore these files:

-s Attempt to optimize disk usage by not writing null blocks
of data to sparse files.

Regards,
Steve