Limitations

The NDMP Plugin uses the job name to track the NDMP backup LEVEL information. It is not possible to mix multiple FileSets with a single job and the same NAS host and the same volumes.
The NDMP password should not contain special characters such as: “, ’, !, $, / or #
With Single Item Restore, the number of files to be restored in a single session should not be too big. Some filers may not react very well with very large file lists.
The Single Item Restore feature is not able to look into the Bacula backup stream. If a single file is selected inside a 1 TB NDMP dump file, 1TB will be read from Bacula’s source volumes. The DIRECT variable cannot be set to “Yes”.
The NDMP dump does not provide information about deleted files. Bacula’s Accurate Mode is not supported.
With the Single Item Restore feature enabled, the NDMP HIST file needs to be analyzed in memory at the end of the NDMP backup session on the File Daemon system. The memory needed for this operation depends on the number of files and the tree structure. On some advanced situation, it is possible to configure a custom NDMP “HIST file” scanner by creating a symlink pointing to /opt/bacula/bin/custom_ndmp_idx_dump.
With the Single Item Restore feature enabled, all the files and directories included in a NDMP dump are stored in the Bacula Catalog. To build the restore tree with the “restore” bconsole command, the Director needs to allocate an average of 170B per file in memory.
The history file (HIST) is stored after each backup session in the working directory. This file is needed to perform a Single Item Restore session. If the file is not present in the directory, the restore may not be successful. The history file is included automatically in the backup. It is possible to restore the history file associated with a given NDMP dump prior to the file restore. When selected, the history file is automatically restored to the working directory.
The Single Item Restore feature has been tested on NetApp and EMC ISILON systems with 50,000 files.
The Single Item Restore feature has not been tested intensively with accented characters.
Permission on directories that are automatically created during a restore with the Single Item feature may not be correct.

The HIST option is supported only with the directory or node file history format. To correctly set this option and verify that it is enabled on EMC Isilion devices, the following commands in the Isilon’s CLI interface may be issued:

NAS1-4# isi ndmp settings variables modify /ifs/path/to/specific/share HIST D

NAS1-4# isi ndmp settings variables list
Path                             Name                 Value
-----------------------------------------------------------
/ifs/path/to/specific/share      HIST                 D

It is not possible to restore individual files from a dump during the local restore (with where=">/path/" option).
The replace option is not respected when using the Single Item Restore feature.
For NDMP Single Item Restores in bconsole, if you wish to use Enter a list of files to restore option (option 7), or the file= option on the bconsole “restore” command line, a file with the list of filenames to restore must also include the names of the NDMP dump that holds the file(s) that you wish to restore.
This plugin does not support backups made using the NDMP Tar format provided by EMC Unity systems.
The native dump format often has a serious limitation of eight for the number of Incremental Jobs that you can run between two Full or Differential backups. Making more than eight Incrementals will not allow you to restore your system accurately. All files will be correctly restored, but subsequent restores of Incremental backups will not recreate the file system as it appeared during the final incremental backup.

With some NAS vendors such as NetApp, it is possible to set more incremental levels using the max_level plugin command parameter (up to 32 with NetApp), or use the BASE_DATE incremental forever backup strategy with the use_base_date plugin command parameter.
The NDMP Plugin is not compatible with the sparse FileSet option.
Backups created using the NDMP Plugin are not compatible with Virtual Full jobs. Do not attempt to combine these two backup strategies as you will not be able to properly restore NDMP Plugin jobs from Virtual Full backups.

The restart command has limitations with plugins, as it initiates the Job from scratch rather than continuing it. Bacula determines whether a Job is restarted or continued, but using the restart command will result in a new Job.