Restoring a backup with a missing tape or corrupt catalog

May 5th, 2006

I recently had a Windows 2003 server that went bersek and where the semi-hardware RAID suddently showed no files more recent than a week before. At the same time, the rsync backup I do on a nearby standing Linux server also failed because the server had refused the mount of the data directory the last time I rebooted the Linux server. Moreover, thanks to Murphy (If something goes wrong, anything will go wrong), the last successful backup was more than a week old because the the data amount grew so much that there was not enough space for all data on one tape - but nobody had put a second tape in the drive to finish the backup.
By default, it is not so easy to restore data from a backup set where one drive is missing. Thankfully, there are at least 2 good sets of howtos:

What do you want me to do with a backup? What I need now is a restore!

• How can Windows 2000 backup restore a multi-tape backup set, when some of the tapes are missing? - From JSI FAQ
• How to restore data from a backup set that contains a missing or corrupted tape - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article