It would only make sense that you could not go back farther than 3 months because that is what you have the browse policy set to. You are browsing the index to find what you want to restore.

Try setting the browse and retention policies to 1 year and do the restore, you can always change it back after the restore.

First, is your data still recoverable or is it recyclable?

we do this all of the time. Our browse is set for 3 months, as well.

Did you do the nsrck - L7 -t (date) clientname ?

If you do that, then you should be able to browse back to that date you want.

It is recoverable. I ran the command to change the browse time to one month from now. In the admin console, when I select the server and have it list the indexes, I can see the restored index. Networker User won't let me choose the date for restore though. And yes I ran the nsrk command. I don't want to restore the whole save set, just a few files. The save set is almost 2TB, and it would be impracticle to restore the whole thing.

Here are a few coomands I ran to maybe help someone help me... I trimmed the output of the first command. The SSID listed is the one I need.

C:\>mminfo -q "client=plrs10" -r "ssid,savetime,name" |more
ssid date name

2717617809 5/1/2009 E:\

C:\>mminfo -aq ssid=2717617809 -r name,client,savetime,ssretent,ssbrowse
name client date retent browse
E:\ plrs10 5/1/2009 10/29/2011 11/26/2009

C:\>nsrck -L7 -t 5/1/2009 plrs10
nsrck: checking index for 'plrs10'
9343:nsrck: The file index for client 'plrs10' will be recovered.9348:nsrck: The
index recovery for 'plrs10' failed.39078:nsrck: File index error: can't find in
dex backups for 'plrs10' on server 'plpdretsp001.enne.entergy.com'


nsrck: Completed checking 1 client(s)

C:\>

Well, it says can't find index backup - this is not the same as backup saveset you showed. Index backup is done by your server itself and also has retention which might have expired. Besides, fact that you have browse longer than retention makes me wonder what is really going on there. Did you do some nasty things, ha?

Hope I didn't do any nasty things. Browse time had already expired, I extended by a month to 11/26/2009, thinking that's what I needed to do to make index browsable. Retention time is two years out (opposite of what you just said, mistake I'm sure).

When you say "your server itself", I assume you mean the backup server, not the client server that the files came from, right? What's the magic command to restore the index to make it usable? I had EMC tech support on the phone with a WebEx session for an hour. They couldn't figure it out. They are supposed to get back to me today.

This next comment may get me black-balled, but I never had this problem with BE. All I had to do was insert the tape set and ask to index. Then I could do all the restores I wanted regardless of when it was made or when it expired. Corporate kind of forced NetWorker on me against my will.

IMHO it looks like something happened to the online index for the client you are trying to restore. The online index is on the local file system of your backup server. The error explicitly states a problem finding the index. The media index is intact but the online index is not which would explain why you are having problems. You followed all the correct steps which normally work. I think the problem may not be NetWorker but the underlying OS or physical disk that the Online Index is written to.

Just a thought.

Just got off the phone with tech support. Apparently I can't extend the browse time without first running the scanner program to restore the index. Tech support set the browse time back to what it was. Since this saveset is 2TB in size and spans 8 tapes, the scanner will take a while.

The command currently running is
scanner -ivv -S ssid \\.\Tape0
with the first tape in the set mounted in the drive indicated.

I should mention that this is a clone set. The normal backup is weekly full with daily incremental, 3-month browse and retention. The first full of each month is cloned and stored offsite with a 2-year retention. The clone is what I am attmepting to restore from.

Will update when the scanner is finished.

You are right, I didn't see that 2011

Support is not correct - you can extend browse time and this is done with nsrck -L7 as in your case, but it fails for you.

index is saved as server's own save set thus you should have looked for something like mminfo -q client=server_name -q recoverable -r name,ssretent | findstr "index:client_name"

(I hope I didn't do the typo there)

Since nsrck says it can't find index for your backup it means there is no recoverable index that matches time frame you gave with nsrck command. I'm not sure if that is correct or not as that requires more insight into your setup and configuration.

(I never tried, but perhaps scanning index saveset could be much faster approach here - anyone tried that before? In theory, you would set index ssid to be norecyclable first, extend retention and do scanner -m and in theory that would allow you to proceed with nsrck -L7 then)

Scarier scenario is that your data was saved under wrong index thus what you got was literally logical error. Scanning usually lasts 2 hours per tape so I guess 16 hours of fun ahead of you. Good luck.