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Listing Backed-Up Files

This article explains how to list backed-up files.

Filespaces

On the backup server, a node's files are divided into filespaces.

Usually, every backed-up mount-point on a machine gets its own filespace. There are exceptions. VSS backups on Windows get their own filespace, and also when using the VIRTUALMOUNTPOINT option (more info here) you end up creating a new filespace for every virtual mount-point.

It is important to understand that this structure exists when listing backed-up files, or when recovering files.

Knowing which filespaces you have allows you to explicitly specify the filespace when listing (or recovering) files. On a Unix-based system, your files are normally under the fs /, and you do not have to specify the filespace explicitly. But if you have a filespace called, for example, /home alongside the filespace /, then it may be unclear where the files you are looking for are if you are searching for files under /home.

This is how you find all filespaces on your node: 

root@hostname ~# dsmc query filespace
IBM Storage Protect
Command Line Backup-Archive Client Interface
  Client Version 8, Release 1, Level 23.0 
  Client date/time: 2024-09-13 08:00:00
(c) Copyright by IBM Corporation and other(s) 1990, 2024. All Rights Reserved. 

Node Name: YOURNODENAME
Session established with server DCO1-BACKUP-SERVER-2: Linux/x86_64
  Server Version 8, Release 1, Level 21.000
  Server date/time: 2024-09-13 08:00:00  Last access: 2024-09-13 08:00:00

  #     Last Incr Date          Type    File Space Name
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1     2024-09-13 04:16:26     EXT4    /

The command dsmc query filespace can be shortened to dsmc q f.

You can also find this information in the Backup Portal by visiting Consumption units -> Your Node -> File spaces.

Listing backed-up files

A basic example of how to list backed-up files: 

dsmc query backup -subdir=yes '{/home}/peter/'

Explanation

Options:

  • -subdir=yes: List all under the specified directory, recursively. Without this option, dsmc will only show direct descendants. (docs)

Positional arguments:

  • '{/home}/peter/': The directory under which files you wish to show. /home is the filespace. You may omit {} if you do not fear any ambiguity, by instead just writing '/home/peter/'. Here, the leading / is important.

More information can be found here.