PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance 5.16.0.0 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.
2. If the name of the share matches to one of the following restricted names (bin, etc, lib, mnt, proc, run, selinux, sys, tmp, var, boot, dev, home, lib64, opt, root, sbin, srv, usr) a failure in the backup/restore operations is observed.

3. If the NFS export is set to map the root user to nobody, PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance cannot back up NFS shares. 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 PowerScale appliances, do one of the following:

   • Change the NFS export settings to Do not map root users.
   • If you have a user or 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 or group of this type, create one for PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance instead of using the root.

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

4. 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.
5. PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance displays the non-English characters such as Japanese or Chinese only for the asset or share names.
6. If you create an asset source in PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance using a SmartConnect name or IP of a network pool that is associated with a nonsystem access zone, the discovery of NAS assets fails because the PowerScale OneFS API is not accessible through a nonsystem access zone.
7. When backing up NAS shares, nonregular files such as socket and FIFO files are skipped and not listed in the logs.
8. NAS protection does not support the backup and recovery of stub files for cloud-tiered files on any NAS array. For any cloud-tiered file, the file is recalled from the cloud and backed up.
9. For Unity, if a File System is configured with a Cloud Tier appliance, the user can see a warning indicating that the File System contains cloud-tiered files, and those files are recalled during the backup.
10. For Unity cluster on two different sites, the NAS assets are always in-sync. In case of failover, DNAS does not backup the same share as same asset but as a different asset.
11. In Linux NFS and Windows SMB, the files and folders with character size of up to 255 bytes are supported on all the arrays. If the character limit is exceeded, the backup is completed with an exception. These files and folders are added to the skip list. The restore of the shares that contains these slices are reported as failure but the data of all the slices is recovered .

    When you restore a share that has folder name with more than 255 characters in the top level, the restore to original location and the restore to an alternate location is reported as Failed, but the data is restored and the following error is displayed on the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance UI:

    ARF0010: Unable to create the restore target /PS210-NS20-Sree-255cifs-restoreshare1//小思七山実入回場野開万全定家北六問話文動度県水安氏和政保表道相意発不党日一大年中会人本月長国出上十生子分東三行同今高金時手見市力米自前円合立内二事社者地京間田体学下目五後新明方部女八心四民対主正代言九小思七山実入回場野開万全定家北六問話文動度県水安氏和政保表道相意発不党// on the host b7a85f1ce562.

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 fail. All restore operations for restricted asset shares fail for both appliances and shares.

Restore and FLR

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 and 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.
4. 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.

5. 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 the original files, PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance 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.

6. 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. Job level
7. You can only cancel FLR operations when the job is still in the queued state. The cancellation of the FLR operation is unavailable once the job is in In Progress state.
8. You cannot restart NAS FLR jobs.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. For restoring NAS shares successfully through 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 nonroot 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 Appliance 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 PowerScale appliances:

1. If PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance was updated from an earlier version, 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 deployments, PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance 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 Appliance 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 to Unity and PowerStore appliances:

1. PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance cannot backup shares that are under active replication.
2. If the filename or the folder path exceeds 255 bytes, the backup fails.

Updating from previous releases

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

1. 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 Appliance 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 Appliance 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 Appliance 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.

File and folder names

In Linux NFS and Windows SMB, the files and folders with character size of up to 255 bytes are supported on all the arrays. If the character limit is exceeded, the backup is completed with an exception. These files and folders are added to the skip list. The restore of the shares that contains these slices are reported as failure but the data of all the slices is recovered .

When you restore a share that has folder name with more than 255 characters in the top level, the restore to original location and the restore to an alternate location is reported as Failed, but the data is restored and the following error is displayed on the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance UI:

ARF0010: Unable to create the restore target /PS210-NS20-Sree-255cifs-restoreshare1//小思七山実入回場野開万全定家北六問話文動度県水安氏和政保表道相意発不党日一大年中会人本月長国出上十生子分東三行同今高金時手見市力米自前円合立内二事社者地京間田体学下目五後新明方部女八心四民対主正代言九小思七山実入回場野開万全定家北六問話文動度県水安氏和政保表道相意発不党// on the host b7a85f1ce562.