[gpfsug-discuss] mmbackup valiating the backups

[Peter Childs]

Hi All,

We use mmbackup to backup our Scale Storage to two IBM Protect Instances.

We would like to validate our backups to ensure that the files we have really are backed up and we don't have any problems. 

So far I've worked out I can query the backups using "query backup --detail" in Protect and get times and dates, From this I can compare with `stat` and `ls` (or using mmapplypolicy (which should be faster)) to check the three indexes match, and check the contents of each directory. (Using --subdir=yes looks great on paper but the output takes days to appear and checking it file by file can be done incrementally and I can use mmapplypolicy to run the report.

Given the stats from Protect the two backup servers are reporting different occupancy figures which suggests to me we may have some inconsistencies. (We're talking a 1/2 TB difference between the two servers according to Protect Query Occupancy) but I'm aware that Protect's figures are estimates and not always accurate.

Verify the backup is always a good plan even if your 101% sure its correct anyway (and I'm not maybe). (Your backups are only as good as the last time you recalled them and all that)  

We could use the shadow database. As this looks to be what Storage Archive does to say yes this file is backed up before it is archived.

Does anyone know the format of the shadow database, which fields are which, as I think knowing the format might allow us to at least know what the differences; and increase our confidence in the backup.

Thanks in advance.

Peter Childs