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Tivoli Storage Manager for Windows Backup-Archive Clients Installation and User's Guide

Performing Point-in-Time Restores

Use a point-in-time restore to restore files to the state that existed at a specific date and time. A point-in-time restore can eliminate the effect of data corruption, or recover a basic configuration to a prior condition.

You can perform a point-in-time restore of a system object, file space, directory, or file.

Perform incremental backups to support a point-in-time restore. During an incremental backup, the client notifies the server when files are deleted from a client file space or directory. Selective and incremental-by-date backups do not notify the server about deleted files. Run incremental backups at a frequency consistent with possible restore requirements.

If you request a point-in-time restore with a date and time that is prior to the oldest version maintained by the Tivoli Storage Manager server, the object is not restored to your system. Files which were deleted from you workstation prior to the point-in-time specified will not be restored.

Notes:

  1. Your administrator must define copy group settings that maintain enough inactive versions of a file to guarantee that you can restore that file to a specific date and time. If enough versions are not maintained, Tivoli Storage Manager may not be able to restore all objects to the point-in-time you specify.

  2. If you delete a file or directory, the next time you run an incremental backup, the active backup version becomes inactive and the oldest versions that exceed the number specified by the versions data deleted attribute of the management class are deleted. See Chapter 8, Understanding Storage Management Policies for more information about the versions data deleted attribute.

When performing a point-in-time restore, consider the following:

To perform a point-in-time restore from the GUI client, use the following steps:

  1. Click the Restore button in the main window. The Restore window appears.
  2. Click the Point-in-Time button from the Restore window. The Point in Time Restore window appears.
  3. Select the Use a Point-in-Time date during restore selection box. Select the date and time and click OK. The point in time that you specified appears in the Point in Time display field in the Restore window.
  4. Display the objects you want to restore. You can search for an object by name, filter the directory tree, or work with the directories in the directory tree.
  5. Click the selection boxes next to the objects you want to restore.
  6. Click the Restore button. The Restore Destination window displays. Enter the appropriate information.
  7. Click the Restore button to start the restore. The Restore Task List window displays the restore processing status.

Note: If there are no backup versions of a directory for the point-in-time you specify, files within that directory are not restoreable from the GUI. However, you can restore these files from the command line. To ensure that you can view and restore all existing files from the GUI during a point-in-time restore, you must maintain the same number of backup versions for directories as days you are restoring back to.

You can start point-in-time restore from the command-line client using the pitdate and pittime options with the query and restore commands. For example, when you use the pitdate and pittime options with the query backup command, you establish the point-in-time for which file information is returned. When you use pitdate and pittime with the restore command, the date and time values you specify establish the point-in-time for which files are returned. If you specify pitdate without a pittime value, pittime defaults to 23:59:59. If you specify pittime without a pitdate value, it is ignored.


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