Source:Advanced Backup and Restore Options

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Docs latest icon.png Welcome to the latest SEP sesam documentation version 4.4.3 Beefalo/Beefalo V2. For previous documentation version(s), check Documentation archive.


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/restore task.

Setting advanced options

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

You can also use the restore wizard to specify 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.

Information sign.png Note
As of v. 4.4.3. Beefalo, the Expert Options button for setting advanced restore options is only available in Expert UI mode. It is not available for users that run the GUI in Basic or Advanced mode. In the latter case, if you want to access Expert Options, you first have to change Basic/Advanced UI mode to Expert, 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 several 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 may force a different disk provisioning method: thin, eager or lazy, which is applied to all restored VMDKs by specifying 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:

-o ignore_finderr=<regex>|ALL

If you want to avoid all such errors/warnings, specify:

-o ignore_finderr=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 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.

Information sign.png Note
Regex mandates that every pattern is followed by a comma.
SBC CLI

Alternatively, to create the include filter and include only the 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/