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About SMTape engine for FlexVol volumes

Contributors netapp-aherbin

SMTape is a disaster recovery solution from ONTAP that backs up blocks of data to tape. You can use SMTape to perform volume backups to tapes. However, you cannot perform a backup at the qtree or subtree level. SMTape supports baseline, differential, and incremental backups. SMTape does not require a license.

You can perform an SMTape backup and restore operation by using an NDMP-compliant backup application. You can choose SMTape to perform backup and restore operations only in the storage virtual machine (SVM) scoped NDMP mode.

Note

Reversion process is not supported when an SMTape backup or restore session is in progress. You must wait until the session finishes or you must abort the NDMP session.

Using SMTape, you can back up 255 Snapshot copies. For subsequent baseline, incremental, or differential backups, you must delete older backed-up Snapshot copies.

Before performing a baseline restore, the volume to which data is being restored must be of type DP and this volume must be in the restricted state. After a successful restore, this volume is automatically online. You can perform subsequent incremental or differential restores on this volume in the order in which the backups were performed.