problem with frecover

[Marco_67]

Hello,

a colleague of mine is trying to restore some tapes I have created with fbackup but he is actually getting hundreads of error message like this:
frecover(1045): error in trailer recovery
frecover(1001): file trailer does not match file header for
frecover(1002): file /local_path/dir/5652579.prt
And the consequence is that all files with the error are not restored.

Another strange issue but which could be linked to the above is that He is running the frecover command by using the root accoount, the directory structure restored has got the root sys as ownership while the few files restored have got the account of another colleague (let say tom) and deamon as user ang group ownership, like this: tom deamon.

Someone has an idea of what is happening ?
Thank you in advance.
Marco

[Prashanth.D.S]

Hi Marco,

It seems like your colleague has backed up a file system that was in use. The file
/local_path/dir/5652579.prt changed after the header record was written for the file.

When writing a file to tape, fbackup attempts to make reasonably
sure that a good copy is written to the backup. This is done by
checking the time stamp when starting to read the file, and
checking the time stamp again while continuing to read the file
data. If the file's modification time stamp has changed while the
data was being written to tape, fbackup writes a "BAD" status
flag to the file's trailer, and re-reads the file, writing the
file to tape again.

This process is repeated until the limits specified in the "-c
config" file are reached (the default is 5 retries). The impact
on tape space is that if a file is active (i.e. it's modification
time changes during the backup), it can consume up to (default)
5 times its normal space on the tape, as fbackup writes consecutive
bad backup copies to the tape."

The fbackup manpage clearly states that to be absolutely sure of consistent
backups, one should not nackup an active filesystem. If the thing being
backed up in this case is a database, you would certainly want to take the
database down first.

Best Regards,
Prashanth

[Marco_67]

Hi Prashanth,

it seems not be the case since when I did the fbackup the process which permit users to modify objects on that file system was down.

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

which os, hardware and fbackup version do you use/uses your colleague?
Have you already tried to fbackup your tapes yourself?

For ownership and group - these items are stored as id's, so if your root id is identical to his tom id, then you'll have this effect.

Volkmar

[Marco_67]

HP-UX 11.11 RP2470