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Restore Testing

Recovering data to another machine for testing purposes can be done by granting another node access to the data of the machine's backup node. We call it a proxy node. This article guides you through the process of testing your backups, including the assignment of proxy node and configuring the backup-archive client on your testing machine accordingly.

Step 1: A node for the test machine

Apart from your production backup node, that has all your data, you will need another node for your test machine. If you do not have one already one, create it in Cloutility and configure your test machine's backup-archive client to use it. You can follow the Quickstart Guide.

Next, in Cloutility, click on Consumption Units -> [Your Test Node] -> Basics -> Proxy configuration -> Targets -> Add. Then select the production node that you wish to test the backups of.

Note

Make sure that the test machine uses the same operating system as the production machine.

Step 2: Configure the test machine client

On the test machine, there is one additional setting you need to add to your configuration file, that is the ASNODENAME option. This tells the client to use the data of another node rather than the client's node. That other node must have been added as a proxy target, or else this option won't work. This is what you did in Step 1.

Add this line to /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsm.sys (Linux) or C:\Program Files\Tivoli\TSM\baclient\dsm.opt (Windows) or C:\Program Files\Tivoli\TSM\TDPSql\dsm.opt (MSSQL):

  ASNODENAME PRODUCTION_NODE_NAME

Replace PRODUCTION_NODE_NAME with the name of your production node.

Encryption

If you want to restore client-side encrypted data, you will also have to specify the decryption key password. The backup service will not be able to supply the password (unless ENCRYPTKEY generate is set).

For more information, see the article on recovering encrypted data.

Step 3: Restore test your data

This can be done in many different ways, depending on if you are using a GUI or a command line interface.

In general, we recommend the How to Restore Files article for more information on how to restore files.

If you are testing MSSQL backup data (Windows), then you will need to use the DP For SQL Management Console on the test machine.

Appendix A: Security Considerations

The test machine, and especially the test machine's node, should be protected at least equally well as the production machine. That is because it has access to all the data backed up from the production machine.

For a virtual machine on Safespring Compute, a good way to secure the test machine is to use Security Groups to limit ingress traffic only to specific IP addresses: