5 1 0:Advanced Backup and Restore Options

Overview

SEP sesam allows you to set additional (advanced) backup and restore options that apply to different task types, e.g., VMware vSphere, MySQL, etc. You can set additional backup or restore options in their properties or when creating a new backup and restore task. You can create a restore task using the GUI restore wizard or via the web interface Restore Assistant.

Setting advanced options in GUI and Web UI

Backup

You can set additional options for backup or restore in the backup task properties: from Main Selection -> Tasks by Clients -> click New Backup Task or double-click the corresponding backup task to open its properties. Under the Options tab -> Additional call arguments -> add your backup or restore option to the Backup options or Restore options field, respectively.

Restore via the web interface

Additional restore options are available in the advanced UI mode. In the startup window, you can select additional restore types, such as restoring backups and VMs to the file system, writing backups and VMs to dump files, restoring a single file from a VM, performing VMware sandbox restore, and so on. An additional Options tab is available for all task types. For details, see the web interface Restore Assistant.

Restore via GUI

You can use the restore wizard to set additional restore options: From Target Settings (fourth step of the restore wizard), under the Expert Options -> Options tab -> Restore options. For details, see Expert Options.

	Note
	The Expert Options button for setting advanced restore options is available only in advanced mode (formerly expert GUI mode). If you cannot see the Expert Options, change simple UI mode (formerly basic GUI mode) to advanced, as described in Selecting UI mode.

VMware restore

A VMware VM consists of data that is stored in a single disk file – the Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) file format; it stores the entire contents of the VM's hard disk drive. Each VM can have one or more .vmdk files, which means that a VM can contain multiple VMDK files (or hard disk drives). The number of .vmdk files depends on the size of the virtual disk. VMDKs can be provisioned in three different formats: Thin, Lazy Zero Thick (flat) or Eager Zero Thick. To improve restore performance, you might want to change the provisioning method for restore.

When restoring a VMware VM, the VM's virtual disks are restored with the original provisioning used at the time of backup. You can force a different disk provisioning method: thin, eager or lazy, which is applied to all restored VMDKs by entering the following command in the restore options field:

-a disk[type]=thin|eager|lazy

If set, this option overrides the VMDK disk type of all VMDKs for VM restore.

Linux Client backup

SEP sesam Linux Client may encounter errors or warnings

A SEP sesam Linux Client may encounter errors or warnings during backup for the following reasons:

• the size of a file has changed during the backup
• a file is deleted during the backup (between 'find' and data processing)
• the 'find' function has encountered an error

To avoid these warnings and fix the above errors, double-click the backup task to open its properties and under the Options tab in the Backup options field enter the following command:

	Note
	You can use a regular expression (see Examples for Excluding Matched Patterns) or 'ALL' if you want to avoid all such errors/warnings.

-o ignore_finderr=<regex>|ALL

The exclude list for Linux Client backup can also be used as an include list

When specifying the exclude list on SEP sesam Linux Client, it is possible to change the exclude to an include filter by using the + (plus) sign at the beginning of a pattern. In this case, only the items that match the defined pattern (regex) are included in the backup.

GUI

The easiest way to turn the exclude list to an include list is to use the GUI Exclude list: Create or open a backup task and enter the following in the Exclude List field:

+<regex>

for example

+xxx.*

or if there are different patterns, you can combine the exclude and include filters as follows:

+abc.*,+.*xyz.*,*\.bak

where the preceding + defines the include filter, while the pattern without the plus (+) defines the exclude filter.

	Note
	Regex mandates that every pattern is followed by a comma.

SBC CLI

Alternatively, to create the include filter and include only those items that match the defined pattern (via the regular expression) using the SBC CLI, enter the command sbc -b with the -x (exclude regex) parameter (for the exclude list), followed by + at the beginning of the specified pattern, as shown in the following example:

sbc -b -s @/dev/null -v 1 -x '+xxx.*' /tmp/test-regex/1/

• For more details on using regular expressions, see Examples for Excluding Matched Patterns.
• For more details on exclude lists, see Creating Exclude List.

Linux sparse files support

SEP sesam v. ≥ 5.0.0 Jaglion provides support for Linux sparse files to prevent running out of disk space during restore.Support for Sparse Files/en

Support for Linux O_NOATIME option to prevent updating last access time

SEP sesam v. ≥ 5.0.0.9 Jaglion V2 supports the O_NOATIME file open command flag to avoid updating the access time (ATIME) when a file is opened or a directory is accessed. During backup, the access time attribute changes each time a file or directory is accessed (opened, read or locked). By using the O_NOATIME option, you disable the access time update, which makes reading a file and backup faster by reducing the metadawrites.

The man page for the open(2) command defines the O_NOATIME option as follows:

O_NOATIME (since Linux 2.6.8)
             Do not update the file last access time (st_atime in the
             inode) when the file is read(2).

This flag is intended for indexing or backup programs where it can significantly reduce disk activity. This flag may not be effective on all filesystems. For details, see open(2) — Linux manual page.

	Note
	O_NOATIME is granted only to the root (superuser) or the user who owns the file.

See also

Standard Backup Procedure – Standard Restore Procedure – Web Restore Assistant – Web Single File Restore for Virtual Machines – Expert Options

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