Hi folks,
(Environment: I have BE 2010 R3 SP2+HotFixes with VMware ESXi 4.1)
I'm running a restore of a full VM to a Testlab cluster in our VM environement, and it's not going well.
I've read up on the How To parts, and am selecting just the Differential of the date I want. Differentials & the associated Full are part of the same policy, I'm using NBD transport, and doing a VM redirect into the Testlab. The redirect is fine, and the job completes succesfully -- but when I power on the VM, I get a blank screen and a single _ for a cursor, which doesn't curse at all anyway.. I've run the job from both tape media, and the B2D media.
Notably, the Job only restores 2.3 Gb of a ~30 Gb VM. And both Job Logs indicate that they only used media from the Tuesday (target) and Monday differential backups... not the previous Friday Full backup set.
The Diff and Full backups are directed to different B2D folders, and duplicate to different tapes - naturally enough. But the reason I have them going to different B2D folders is because the Best Practices for B2D folders says to separate GRT and non-GRT backups in this way.
I looked at the Full backup, and indeed it is a GRT, but the Differentials are not. This is because VM backup Best Practices say that you cannot use GRT for Differential backups of a VM. Indeed, when I took over from my predecessor, several VM differential jobs with GRT selected would irregularly encounter a 9598 error.
So the Full backup is directed to an IMGxxxxx file, and the Differential backups go to B2Dxxxxx files.
Is this the problem? If I mix GRT-Full and non-GRT-Diff backups of VMs... the differential restore breaks?
Does this sound correct? I would like to have the option to pull individual files from my VM backups (GRT)... but I would much rather be able to restore differentials, otherwise all those differential backups are a waste of magnetic space!
Please advise.
Thank you.
.
Neil
