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Brian BFlag for Canada

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Recovering Novell 6 Backup Files

My client had a Novell 6.0 server that lost two drives. So it is pretty much dead. They are moving on, but we still need to restore their data that was backed up to tape from this server to an Arcserve for Windows 11.5 server.

We had some discussion about this in another post, but it was off topic. So I thought I would repost.

There are some options I have thought of so far...
1. We couldn't find the 6.0 software. We have 5.0 and also Novell lite (for windows?) 4.11. We tried installing the Novell 5.0 software on some newer hardware, but it won't recognize the drives. We can try could try and find some older hardware and see if we have any success.
2. I downloaded a trial of the new SUSE based Novell and have it installed, but I don't know if the Arcserve client will work with this.
3. Install the OS in a VM.
4. This seems like the best solution: An expert here has told me you can restore an arcserve Novell backup. However when I try to do a restore to a directory on the Arcserver server, nothing happens. It seems to skip over the files.
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Bud Durland
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Presuming compatible tape types (DAT, DLT, etc), and reasonable close ArcServe versions, you should be able to restore files made on a nEtWare backup to a Windows server.  I've done it a couple times.  Possible hurdles and gotchas:

ArcServe may want/need to recatalog the tape first, before it will do any operations.

If the NetWare backup job did NOT have the "uncompress files before backup' option set, the files may be on the tape in Novell's compressed format.  This is not ArcServe compressing the data before writing the tape; NetWare could  compress rarely used files on disk to conserve space, and unless otherwise instructed, ArcServe would write them to the tape in that format.  If they are on the tape in compressed format, even if you successfully read the tape and put the files on the Windows server, they will do you now good.

Have you considered sending the drives to a recovery service?  Depending on the configuration that was used, recovering the data may not be terribly expensive (only fairly expensive).   But, in the long run, considering the time taken to set the environment up that ca read the tapes,  you might be farther ahead.  Many recovery outfits will rad the data fro mthe failed device(s) and  write it to a medium and format of your choice (for us, that was a 500GB ide drive & NTFS)
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deroode
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Avatar of Brian B

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That's cool. I didn't think of looking in the patches, only the downloads area. I will try that, thanks.
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ASKER

The setup is asking for floppy disk with a cryptography file? If I try to ignore it, the installation cancels.
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ASKER

Okay, it seems to boot up. No network card recognized though. I'll have to see if I can find a driver.
The cryptography file is on the floppy with the license, which is probably in your safe... (or should be)
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ASKER

I got past that, but am unable to install the network driver. I have downloaded it to a disk, but when I run nwconfig and try to install it from A:, it says no driver files were found. I double-checked the disk and the file is there. Do you have to run a command to mount the disk?
You need a .lan file as well as an .ldi file. The .ldi file contains the configuration information.

You can also try to load the lan driver from the diskette itself, just to check that you have the correct one. When you load the driver and it recognizes the adapter it will ask you for pci details. You can then use toolbox.nlm to copy the driver to sys:system.
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ASKER

The disk contains a lan, ldi and txt file in the root directory. The BIOS show the drive is there. However I don't know if the issue is the novell has not mounted the floppy drive, or I have the wrong drivers. I assume it would recognize the drivers ever if they don't match the hardware. When I run nwconfig, I am telling it the path for the drivers is A:\.
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ASKER

Okay, I managed to find a Novell 6.5 instead. This already has the required drivers built in, since it recognized the NIC during install. Much easier to use.

So I have the Novell server set up, I just installed the Arcserve agent. Lets see if it works.
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ASKER

So I was finally successful. I am going to post my notes here for anyone else who happens to be searching for this solution.

I expect a lot of this could be automated if this were a production environment, but I only this to function for the duration of the restore.

- Created a restore partition and volume on the Novell server using nssmu.
- Had to install the Arcserver novell agent by pushing it from a windows workstation.
- Had to actually run nwagent on the novell server so the server could connect to it.
- Need to make sure you use the full path .<user>.<server> to get the agent to connect.
- Log in to the server using the Novell client for windows before running the restore.
Avatar of Brian B

ASKER

That pointer got me started towards the ultimate solution. Thanks for the help!