How to verify NDMP dump on Netapp filer in case of Filer2Server backups

Last Update: 2015-08-29 08:23:29 UTC

Description:

How to verify NDMP dump on Netapp filer in case of Filer2Server backups

Solution:

Filer2Server is a method where backup data traverses all the way to the backup server and then gets written to the FSD/Dedupe/Tape devices available to the Backup server.

This is allows you to do NDMP based backups of NAS filers where data is managed using NDMP. This feature is available from CA ARCserve Backup 16.0 and above.

In scenarios where NDMP backups of NetApp Filer  fails while dumping the data and where only Filer2Server backups are possible  i.e, when there is no Tape Library seen by the filer itself and data comes all the way to the backup server.

In such scenarios we can test to determine if there is any issue with Data Dump itself. Since there is no Tape library attached, NDMP dump can be performed to local null device which will perform complete dump operation on a Null Device without actually writing any data.

This can be performed using the below command:

dump 0f null /vol/vol0

This would take a full backup of /vol/vol0 to /dev/null device

This would let us know if there is any issue with NDMP DUMP itself and we could see in               
/vol/vol0/etc/log/backup log if dumping is happening correctly or not.