Preparing for Disaster

Not only do you need to back up important data on a daily basis, you need to develop and test a plan for recovering your data if a disk crashes or you lose critical data. The more time and effort you invest in creating and testing your plan, the better prepared you are if disaster strikes.

Disaster Recovery Requirements

If you have included your Backup server and clients in a scheduled backup, you are well on your way to being prepared for a disaster. With each server backup, Backup creates a special save set called the bootstrap essential for recovering from a disaster.

Along with the bootstrap information, you should also keep accurate records of your network, system configurations, and maintain a safe location for all your original software.

The severity of the destroyed or lost data determines the number of procedures you need to perform. To accomplish the most comprehensive disaster recovery, you need the following items:

• Original operating system media and patches

• Original Backup media

• Device drivers and media device names

• Filesystem configuration

• IP addresses and hostnames

• Bootstrap information

• Enabler and authorization codes (under certain circumstances)

To recover from a disaster where you need to reinstall the operating system, you have two choices. You can perform a complete installation where you reinstall all the operating system files and recreate any special configurations. Or, you can perform a partial reinstall of the operating system and wait to recover the system configuration files with Backup after your system is functional. If you have an autochanger, you can either configure and use the autochanger during the recovery, or use the drive in the autochanger as a stand-alone device.