Topics | How To | Related Topics | Use Cases: QR Disaster Recovery
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Recovering Consistent Recovery Points
Recovery Considerations for This Agent
The Quick Recovery Agent supports the following types of recovery:
The ultimate purpose of QR Volumes is to provide for rapid recovery of critical data. The QR Agent provides automated tools to assist you in the recovery process.
For the Quick Recovery Agent, recovery operations can be performed from the client and agent levels in the CommCell Browser.
SnapVault does not support Quick Recovery or Copyback. Data is browsed and restored at the file or volume level. See Restore Data - SnapVault for an overview of restoring data using SnapVault.
During a quick recovery operation, the source volume is unmounted, and then the QR Volume is automatically mounted in its place (with the same mount point). The mount point for the source volume must exist in order to swap the mount points during a quick recovery. If the source volume is corrupted or not available, mount another volume to the source volume mount point before performing the quick recovery. Specifically, when a recovery operation is executed:
In addition to Quick Recovery, the QR Agent also provides a Copyback feature.
Consistent Recovery Points, created through the Quick Recovery Agent and QSnap, can be recovered using the Copyback feature. See Recover Consistent Recovery Points.
When restoring application data, steps must be taken to suspend and resume the application gracefully while ensuring the integrity of the application data structures.
See Overview - Quick Recovery Agent for a list of applications that the QR Agent can automatically recover.
To recover a supported application volume, the respective iDataAgents must be installed on the client together with the QR Agent. Browse the backup data on the appropriate iDataAgent, and select the snapshot version of the application data object (e.g., Exchange 2000 Storage Group) that you wish to recover. The QR Agent will automatically suspend the application, dismount the old primary volume(s), and remount the appropriate QR Volume(s) in their place.
The QR Volumes will be recovered in the following states, depending upon the type of volume recovered:
The stores are recovered in an unmounted state. Exchange services must be running for Quick Recovery of Exchange data to succeed.
With QSnap, when SQL data is being recovered, the user will be asked if the database should be put in the loading state. If the user selects Yes, the database will be in the loading state. If the user selects No, the database will be online.
With VSS, SQL data recovery will always leave the database in the loading state.
The databases are mounted, but not open.
These states allow for maximum flexibility once the QR Agent has recovered the volume(s). For example, because the volumes are not mounted to be active, logs can still be applied to update the volumes.
If a QR volume is created before a full backup, then the gap of transactions between the two could cause an out-of-sequence log restore. Because of this, log restores are typically not allowed if a full backup was performed after a QR Volume was created.
To recover an individual volume, use the Browse QR Volumes window. As with the application-specific recovery process, the primary volume will be dismounted and the QR Volume will be mounted in its place. No special steps are taken to synchronize applications in this case; synchronization must be done manually.
Consistent Recovery Points created with the QR Agent are recovered in the Browse QR Volumes window through the Copyback feature; follow the Copy Back a QR Volume procedure. Using Copyback, you can recover both mounted and unmounted Recovery Points.
For more information about this feature, see Recovery on the Recovery Points page, and Copyback and Snapshot Copyback Considerations on this page.
A copyback operation copies a QR Volume or snapshot to another volume. The destination volume is selected when the copyback operation is started in the QR Volume Browse window. Multiple QR Volumes and/or snapshots can be copied back by selecting multiple volumes in the QR Volume Browse window. The data is copied directly from the QR Volume; no snapshot is necessary for this operation. When copying volumes using copyback, note the following:
By default, the Quick Recovery Agent recovers volumes to the client computer from which it originated. This is comparable to an in-place restore on other agents. The Quick Recovery Agent is a volume-level agent and has unique recovery destinations described below.
You can also manually mount the QR Volume or copy back the volume to another client computer in the CommCell. Keep in mind the following considerations when mounting or copying back volumes to different computers:
The following section enumerates the types of recovery destinations that are supported by the Quick Recovery Agent. See Restore/Recover/Retrieve Destinations - Support for a list of Agents supporting each restore destination type.
Quick Recovery operations are always in-place. The QR Volume is assigned the mount point of the source volume (after automatically unmounting the source volume). Therefore, Quick Recovery always recovers to the same operating system, client computer, etc.
Quick Recovery is not supported out-of-place. Copyback and manual mounting of QR Volumes provide the basic means for accessing data out-of-place, taking into account the considerations listed above.
Because Quick Recovery operations are always to the same computer, cross-platform recovery is not supported.
When mounting QR Volumes or copying back QR Volumes to a different platform consider the following:
To avoid common problems, review the following before starting a recovery operation:
The QR Recovery Job Summary Report provides a summary of QR recovery operations for each client.