Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Recovering a file from Backup


Earlier today I've received a call from one of my users asking to recover a file from backup. He explained that last week's power shutdown caused some files mess up in his home directory.
Blame it on the network, that's the way to go!

I wrote down the file name and exact path and loaded Backup Exec's Restore wizard. Looking at all my weekly full backups I found the Friday prior to the power shutdown and restored the file he was looking for. He wasn't happy.

The explanation I received was that "the system" saved a second copy of that file under a different name!
I had to insist it is not possible since systems do not save files or rename them and no other user has access to the home folder of that user.
More to the fire he claimed that the recovered file is older then the one he was looking for. At this point I had to ask him how does it relate to the power shutdown if whatever happened more then a week earlier???

Went back to Backup Exec and located the file from previous week where the creation date and modified date where exactly identical, similar to the date he created the file. That file also was "wrong".

At this point I innocently suggested that he might have saved it in a different location. 10 minutes and a long lecture on his methodical file organization system later he called again: He found the file under a different folder.

One technical tip I want to share from my experience this morning relate to the recovered file.
I did not want to recover the file to the original location (and by now you understand why). I usually recover files to the local disk at c:\BE_Recovery
When the recovered file come from a home folder the NTFS permissions are still in affect and you can't access it.
In order to see the files at \\Home\DomainName\Username, copy them to any other location or delete the folder and files when you're done, you have to do 2 things:
Add the domain admin with modify permissions
Allow permission inheritance to sub folders

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