When Data Isn't There, But Is Really There!

OK so the title seems odd, but I had this occur recently when our UNIX Admins decided to convert a subdirectory to a file system. So they created the file system and wiped out the subdirectory expecting us to restore the data. When you would query for the backups nothing would show as having been backed up. (Let me clarify that the Admins did the change and then a week later alerted us and asked for the restore.) So the project manager asked for the restore but did not clarify the directory had gone from /opt/ar/ to being file system /opt/ar/. So any

dsmc res /opt/ar/* /opt/ar/ -pick -inactive -subdir=yes 

returned no data. What I had to do was

dsmc res /opt/* /opt/ar/ -pick -inactive -subdir=yes -pitd=

and then the data would show and I could select it manually for restore. If there is one thing I have learned with TSM is always double, triple, and quadruple check for "missing" data using various methods, chances are it is probably there. Remember the user is clueless....don't get me started on symbolic links and how users don't always know the actual location of their data.

TSM & File System Support

First off I hope everyone had a good holiday season. Now that we can focus on work again I wanted to discuss a topic of file system types. I just had an incident where a Solaris server had ZFS used for some newer file systems. The admins had added them without consulting us, and we didn't catch it because TSM didn't even attempt to back them up. Our client level was 5.4.1.0 and ZFS support was added with the 5.4.1.2 update. Once I updated the client the file systems were backed up successfully and show the correct format. We did see one file system was returning a type of UNKNOWN and that should have alerted us, but we were not receiving errors or failures on the backup of the server in question.

So here is the question, how do you keep something like this from happening in the future as new, more bleeding edge file system types are added? Obviously you need to inform your Unix Admins to work with you whenever they add a newer file system type, but if they don't alert you, and TSM doesn't report failures, how would you know? It's bound to happen as the Linux community adds newer, more robust file system types. Other than stay as current as possible with my TSM client levels (which wont always be the fix) what would you suggest?