Introduction
Restoring data from NL Isilon is quite a simple affair with standard UNIX commands. This how to may just save some time on the trial and error aspect of a restore. If a request comes in to retrieve data then the obvious starting point is to find the data in question. Once you know the data path/s though the following can be quite helpful to restore the data. First to a local directory on NL, then by transferring the data to a production cluster as required.
Commands
First make a directory to restore to. I like to create a ticket path with a separate directory of the restore date.
mkdir -p /ifs/restore/<ticket>/<restore-date>
Then from each snapshot directory copy the required data to the newly created restore location. Rsync is preferred as it preserves permissions and can run through multiple files in sequence giving you a helpful progress bar the entire time. The archive flag also preserves permissions/owners etc on the restore.
cd /ifs/.snapshot/<SyncIQ_PolicyName>/path-to-data/ rsync --progress -a <filename-wildcard> /ifs/restore/<ticket>/<restore-date>
Once the data is restored to the restore location on NL Isilon. The data can be compressed into a tar file which also preserves permissions on the transfer to the production cluster.
tar -cvf <restore-date.tar> /ifs/restore/<ticket>/<restore-date>
Once archived to file. Transfer using scp.
scp <restore-date.tar> root@production-isilon-IP:/ifs/restore/<restore-date.tar>
Now on the production cluster, move the data to its final destination path, be it the data’s original location or another path using:
mv /ifs/restore/<restore-date.tar> /ifs/destination-data-path
Once in the required path. You can view the tarball using:
tar -tvf <restore-date.tar>
and extract using:
tar -xvf <restore-date.tar>
Not too onerous a task but can take some time depending on the amount of data being restored.
