PowerProtect Data Manager 19.13 Network-Attached Storage User Guide

Backup

The Appliance protection section contains related information for backups of NAS appliances.

1. By default, only protected NAS assets display a value for asset size. This behavior is consistent with assets that belong to PowerStore/PowerScale/Unity and Generic Shares. In PowerProtect Data Manager 19.10 and earlier versions,
   • This behavior is restricted to assets that belong to Generic Shares and PowerScale.
   • The asset size for both protected and unprotected assets, which belong to Unity/Powerstore, displays the file system size instead of the NAS share size. This provides an inflated number for asset size as the file system size is inclusive of all the shares that are hosted on it.

2. PowerProtect Data Manager cannot back up NFS shares if the NFS export is set to map the root user to nobody. The mounted share does not have read or write privileges, and the operation fails because of permission errors. This limitation applies to all NFS shares.

   For Isilon/PowerScale appliances:

   • Change the NFS export settings to Do not map root users.

     or

   • If you have a user/group (local or through an authentication provider) added to the BackupAdmin role, that user can be associated with the NFS assets. Membership of the associated user supersedes the file system permissions for protection purposes. If you do not have a user/group of this type, create one for PowerProtect Data Manager instead of using the root.

   The Isilon OneFS Web Administration Guide and Isilon OneFS CLI Administration Guide provide more information about NFS export settings and root squashing.

3. For CIFS, the presence of some special characters in the name of a file, folder, or asset name may result in the failure of backup and recovery operations. For example: <, >, and =. The Microsoft CIFS protocol documentation contains more information and a full list of special characters that should not be used.
4. PowerProtect Data Manager displays the non-English characters such as Japanese or Chinese only for the asset/share names.
5. If you create an asset source in PowerProtect Data Manager using a SmartConnect name or IP of a network pool associated with a nonsystem access zone, the discovery of NAS assets will fail. Because the PowerScale OneFS API is not accessible through a nonsystem access zone.
6. When backing up NAS shares, non-regular files such as socket and FIFO files are skipped and not listed in the logs.

Restricted access shares

1. For NAS appliances, the NAS agent successfully backs up discovered shares with the No Access property. The appliance permits a snapshot of the share despite access restrictions, and the agent backs up the snapshot.

   To prevent backups of restricted-access shares, add the share as an exclusion. For CIFS and NFS shares, the agent honors the permission and the backups fails. All restore operations for restricted asset shares fail for both appliances and shares.

Restore and FLR

1. NAS backups do not support FLR from backups on remote (replicated) protection storage or from backups in a cloud stage (Cloud Tier).
2. When you search with FLR for folders, the folder size may be incorrectly shown as zero even when the folder contains files and other folders of nonzero size. Restore operations are unaffected.
3. The FLR UI limit is 500 selected items. Selecting 500 or more files or folders in a single FLR operation may return an error message or encounter browser limitations. To work around the limitation, restore the next higher folder, split large FLR operations into multiple smaller operations, or use the REST API instead. FLR operations to restore folders that contain more than 500 files or subfolders are unaffected.
4. For FLR, selecting both a file or folder and its parent folder from the same backup may result in inconsistent renaming of duplicate restored data. Select files and folders that do not share a parent/child relationship and select only the parent folder to recover everything in that folder. For example, instead of selecting /foo and /foo/bar, select only /foo.
5. Unity and PowerStore appliances have known mounting issues with NFS v3 and v4. Share-level recovery and FLR fail with an error when you restore to the original or alternate location under the following conditions:
   • NFS v3: The NFS export path contains the file system name followed by a forward slash (/). For example, 10.2.3.4:/filesystem_name/share_name.
   • NFS v4: The NFS export path contains a forward slash (/). For example, 10.2.3.4:/test/share.
   NOTE: The NFS syntax imposes one forward slash immediately after the colon (:) as part of the separation between host and path (host:/path). Instead, this limitation applies to any additional forward slashes that are present in the path (filesystem_name/share_name).
   Instead, restore to a location where these conditions are not present.

6. When you perform FLR on different versions of a file from multiple backups of a Linux file server, unexpected behavior may occur. If you select the options to restore to the same folder and overwrite original files, PowerProtect Data Manager does not mark the restored files with the transaction ID. Instead, the restore operation appends the complete path to the expected restore location.

   For example, the file /mnt/tmp/backup/dir4/test.txt that should be restored to /mnt/tmp/backup/mnt/tmp/backup/dir4/test_transactionid.txt is instead restored to /mnt/tmp/backup/mnt/tmp/backup/mnt/tmp/backup/dir4/test.txt. Other share types are not affected.

   This limitation affects NFS v4 exports that were created with the option fsid=0 or fsid=root. For these exports, perform FLR to an alternate location instead of restoring to the original location.

7. For FLR and share-level restore, to restore from a backup of an asset which is no longer part of a protection policy, set asset-level credentials.
8. You can only cancel FLR operations at the job level. PowerProtect Data Manager does not support FLR cancellation for individual assets.
9. You cannot restart NAS FLR jobs.
10. For FLR, when you restore different versions of files with Restore to an Alternate Share or Array, the resulting folder does not have the original ACLs. Instead, the restore creates this folder with root ownership and attributes.
11. For CIFS, the presence of some special characters in the name of a file, folder, or asset name may result in the failure of backup and recovery operations. For example: <, >, and =. The Microsoft CIFS protocol documentation contains more information and a full list of special characters that should not be used.
12. For restoring NAS shares successfully through Isilon/PowerScale 9.0 and later versions,
    • The user must be granted the Write permissions under Others.

      Or

    • Select the Run as root option for the non-root user while performing the restore.

Access control lists (ACLs)

1. If you restore a backup to a share that uses a different protocol version from the original share, the ACLs of the restored files and folders may not exactly match the originals.
2. If a share is offered through multiple protocols, the backup only preserves the ACLs for the selected protocol.
3. When PowerProtect Data Manager cannot preserve the ACLs during a backup, that backup completes with an exception.

Backup stream counts

1. During a NAS backup, the reported active stream count may not be correct until the backup completes or until all active streams from a NAS protection engine close. During this time, the reported active stream count may not match the number of active streams as reported by PowerProtect DD. Most often, this issue occurs during full backups with large slice sizes. To determine the number of active streams before backup completion, use the PowerProtect DD UI.

Appliance protection

The following limitations apply for Isilon/PowerScale appliances:

1. If PowerProtect Data Manager was updated from an older release, the asset list may show two additional discovered entries: /ifs/.snapshot and /ifs. These assets are marked as not detected. These entries are process artifacts, not valid assets, and you can ignore them. For new installations, PowerProtect Data Manager filters these entries from the asset list.

   Do not add these assets to a protection policy other than an exclusion policy. If you add them to a protection policy, PowerProtect Data Manager skips any resulting backups of these assets.

2. Share size is not automatically discovered, so protection rules which are based on share size do not return any assets.

The following limitations apply for Unity/PowerStore appliances:

1. PowerProtect Data Manager cannot backup shares that are under active replication.

Updating from previous releases

For Isilon/PowerScale appliances with multiple NFS exports that have the same name and different properties, the PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 UI listed the duplicate exports as separate NFS assets. These duplicate assets could be assigned to multiple protection policies. However, this behavior has changed for PowerProtect Data Manager 19.10.

If you had assigned duplicate assets to multiple protection policies, perform the following actions:

1. After updating to PowerProtect Data Manager 19.10, the UI shows one of the assets for each export in the Available state. The remaining duplicate assets for that export are shown as Not Detected. Verify whether the Available asset is part of the correct protection policy.
2. The Restore window shows duplicate assets with the same name. However, the backup data for these assets is identical. After the update, the duplicate assets remain visible. Ensure that you restore from the correct backup.
3. The FLR UI displays the contents of a duplicate asset multiple times. Ensure that you restore from the correct backup.

For assets that are shown as Not Detected, PowerProtect Data Manager disables the option to restore to the original location.

Capacity usage

The following two use cases can affect front-end protected capacity by terabyte (FETB) capacity usage:

• If a NAS offers shares through multiple protocols, the same data may be available through more than one asset. PowerProtect Data Manager displays these shares for you to select a preferred protocol.
• If a NAS offers multiple shares that are part of the same file system path, the same data may be available through more than one asset.

  For example, the export paths for two shares /test1 and /test2 share the same local file system path /home/users/validation.

If you add duplicate or overlapping assets to one or more protection policies, the FETB usage increases proportionately to the number of such assets. PowerProtect Data Manager displays a warning when you try to add duplicate or overlapping assets to protection policies.

Copy compliance

On the Infrastructure > Assets > Asset <asset name> page, the Edit Retention button is enabled only when the Copy Status of an asset copy is Available. In detail, if deleting a copy of a protected asset fails, the Copy Status is changed from Available to another state, and as a result the Edit Retention button is disabled.