Managing Network File Share Data

Topics | How To | Related Topics

Overview

Prerequisites

Planning
System Requirements
License Requirements
User Credentials for Impersonation

Important Considerations

General Considerations

Considerations for Creating NAS Subclient

Overview

The Network File Share feature allows the File Archiver for Windows Agent to archive and recover data residing on a NAS File Server or non-local machines that can be accessed via a UNC path. The feature requires the installation of the File Share Archiver Client component.

The diagram on the right depicts a typical configuration for this feature.

To utilize this feature, the File Share Archiver Client must be installed on any computer from which you wish to recover files archived by the File Archiver for Windows Agent.

The client hosting the Agent, must either be in the same domain in which the file server resides or in a different domain from the file server, provided the file server domain and the client domain can communicate with each other.

Prerequisites

Consider the following before you begin using this feature:

Planning

Plan an archive and recover strategy as follows:

Identify the shares that will be archived.
Define the archive rules.
To understand the archiving rules available with the software see Migration Archiving - File Archiver for Windows Agent.
Establish policies to meet strategic Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) goals.

System Requirements

Verify that the computer in which you wish to install the software satisfies the minimum requirements specified in System Requirements - File Archiver for Windows Agent.

License Requirements

The NetWork File Share Subclient feature requires the following license:

DataArchiver for Files - Network Storage for the capability of File Archiver for Windows to archive and recover data residing on NAS File Server or non-local machines. One license is consumed when either a Network File Share or FPolicy instance is created.

For more information on File Archiver for Windows licenses, see License Requirement.

User Credentials for Impersonation

The user account must have read and write permissions on the CIFS share and exported to the network storage file server/proxy. The user account must also have admin access to filer and read/write access to the Windows registry on the proxy computer.

Installation

No additional software is required to configure the Celerra Proxy Stub Subclient. Ensure that the File Archiver for Windows Agent is installed on the Proxy Client computer.

For more information on installing the File Archiver for Windows Agent see Deployment - File Archiver For Windows Agent.

Configuration

The following section provides the high-level steps for installing the File Share Archiver Client software, creating a Network File Share instance and a user defined subclient for archiving and recovery of data residing on a NAS File Server.

This is the only type of instance that requires installing the File Share Archiver Client software.
See Install the File Share Archiver Client for step-by-step instructions.
From the Commcell Console create the File Archiver for Windows Agent Network File Share Instance for the corresponding NAS configuration on the Client computer.
See Create/Modify a Network File Share Instance for step-by-step instructions.
From the CommCell Console create the Network File Share Subclient on the Client computer.
See Create a New Subclient for step-by-step instructions.
From the CommCell Console configure file server Authentication Credentials on the Client computer.
See Configure File Server Authentication Credentials for step-by-step instructions.

Operations

After installing and configuring the required components, data is ready for archiving and recovery.

Migration Archiving

The recovery administrator can schedule migration archiving jobs, similar to scheduling backup jobs for iDataAgents. To ensure that only successfully archived files will be changed into stubs, the migration archiving operation is divided into two phases: archiving and stubbing.

Refer to Migration Archiving for more information on archiving.

Recovery

File Archiver for Windows provides two ways to recover an archived file: by accessing the file with an Open operation (e.g., opening a stub in an application, double-clicking a stub in Windows Explorer) or from the CommCell Console (stand-alone application).

Refer to Recover Archived Data for more information on Recovery operations.

Best Practices

Best practices guidelines include the following:

Although one subclient may be sufficient to meet your archiving needs, you can create additional user-defined subclients to distribute the data for archiving. A useful way to distribute subclient content of a File Archiver for Windows client is by directory, as shown in this example:
- User-defined subclient: Subclient-Directory-1
  Content: \\file_server1\dir1
- User-defined subclient: Subclient-Directory-2
  Content: \\file_server1\dir2
- User-defined subclient: Subclient-Directory-3
  Content: \\file_server1\dir3
Distributing the client data using subclients in this way can help improve archiving performance by balancing the processing load into logical groupings.

Important Considerations

When creating and configuring subclients, keep in mind the following considerations:

General Considerations

You need to establish the archiving rules for the subclient in addition to specifying the subclient name, storage policy association and content.
If you enable the Do Not Create Stub or Archive Files Only rule option, a non-browse recovery operation would not be possible and archived data will have to be recovered via the browse/recovery operation from the CommCell Console.
When configured for NAS archiving, filtering is only supported for wildcard patterns and files on the Subclient Properties (Filters) tab. Paths cannot be filtered out.
When configured for NAS archiving, if your subclient content includes files from a Unix share (NFS share), and if you perform a (migration) archiving operation on these files, the file names for these files will become corrupted if the file names either include any characters not supported in Windows (including *, ?, “, <,>, |, /, \, or :) or contain more than the maximum number of characters allowed by Windows (255 characters). Therefore, after a recovery operation, please carefully examine files if any of the files have been added from a Unix share (NFS share).
A Network File Share instance on a NetApp filer can be converted into an FPolicy instance after files have been migrated from it by de-configuring the Network File Share instance and creating an FPolicy instance and pointing it to the same NetApp filer. The DataArchiver services should be restarted once the FPolicy instance has been created. The Network File Share stubs on the NetApp filer can be recalled on a remote machine which does not have the File Share Archiver Client installed on it.

Considerations for Creating NAS Subclient

When you configure subclient content, you can either manually add content or browse the directory tree structure of the NAS File Server and select the folders/directories you want scanned for archiving. The resulting content will display the folder/directory names similar to the example shown below:
\\file_server1\dir1
\\file_server1\dir2
\\file_server1\dir3

Note that the depiction of content in the above example varies by File Server and operating system.
Subclient-level archiving filters are available for this agent to exclude specified files/folders/patterns from being scanned for archiving. For example, suppose the dirl folder contains a subdirectory called Temp Files that you do not want archived. You can add a subclient filter for the user-defined subclient Subclient-Directory-1 to exclude the Temp Files subdirectory from being scanned for archiving. For more information, see Filters.
Wildcards and regular expressions are supported by the agent in the subclient filter:
For example the asterisk (*) wildcard can be used in the Exclude these files/folders/patterns field when filtering data using subclient-level archive filters to exclude file patterns and folders/directories from being scanned for archiving. For example:
- To exclude all files of a certain type, you could enter the following regular expression: *.doc
- To exclude all files within a directory called "my_folder", you could enter the following regular expression: my_folder/*.*