A dump backup sometimes does not finish because of internal or external errors, such as tape write errors, power outages, accidental user interruptions, or internal inconsistency on the storage system. If your backup fails for one of these reasons, you can restart it.
You can choose to interrupt and restart a backup to avoid periods of heavy traffic on the storage system or to avoid competition for other limited resources on the storage system, such as a tape drive. You can interrupt a long backup and restart it later if a more urgent restore (or backup) requires the same tape drive. Restartable backups persist across reboots.
You can restart an aborted backup to tape only if the following conditions are true:
Starting with Data ONTAP 7.2.3, you can restart dumps of volumes containing qtree SnapMirror destinations.
Dumps of volumes containing qtree SnapMirror destinations read data from multiple Snapshot copies and write them onto a tape. When such a dump operation is aborted and left in a restartable state, the associated Snapshot copies are locked. These Snapshot copies are released after the backup context is deleted. To view the list of locked Snapshot copies, run the backup status command.
filer> backup status 2 State: RESTARTABLE Type: ndmp Path: /vol/vol1 Level: 0 Snapshot: filer(0101184236)_vol1_filer_svp-dst.0 Snapshot: snapshot_for_backup.9 [Dec 27 00:41] Options: b=63, X Devices: [none] Completed: 1 tapefile(s) Last Update: Thu Dec 27 00:41:23 2007
