NetBackup - Estimating the amount of data to be restored

At work I manage the Symantec NetBackup 7.5 environment (RHEL6.5). Every once in a while I'll get a request to restore some data from tape but what I have noticed is that it is somewhat difficult to tell how much data I will be restoring. NetBackup doesn't seem to have an easy way to show the amount of data that will be restored. I search but couldn't really find anything so if anyone has an easier way I would like to know. Anyways, I decided to take matters into my own hands and craft a quick little script to help me.

These steps are done on a NetBackup Linux master server. If you're using Windows Server well the bash script may not help much but the theory should still be sound. Maybe one day I will port it over to Windows...

1. Use the bplist command to find all files and folders that you will be restoring. If you have never used it before I'd suggest to check out Symantec's tech note on bplist. In this example I will be using bplist to list all files/folders from a NDMP client.
   
   

    bplist -C ndmpclientname -S netbackupmaster -k NDMP-policy -t 19 -b -l -s 02/22/2014 00:00:00 -e 03/01/2014 00:00:00 /vol/DirToRestore > ndmp_bplist  
   




2. The above command lists files and folders in a format similar to if you were to use the "ls -l" command in the terminal.
   
   Example:
   

    drwxrwxrwx 2259   2259       4096 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/test1  
    drwxrwxrwx 2259   2259       4096 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/test2  
    -r-xr--r-- 2259   2259       727 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/File1  
   




3. At this point you technically have all the file sizes in Bytes, for example, File1 is 727 Bytes. Of course it isn't that easy when you are restoring 100,000 files. You could sit there and start adding all day or just use the below script.

Usage: ./GetTotalSize.sh ndmp_bplist

The above script can be modified to include TB at some point. As a disclaimer I have only used it for UNIX clients. It assumes that column 4 is the size of the file in the bplist output. If for some reason this isn't true than the script will fail. Enjoy!