Make Recovery & Backup

[Brian Pyle]

Hi Patrick,
I was just looking at your backup scenerio and it peeked my interest. What backup software are you using? Do you shut it down, and make a manual backup of your indexes? Do you include this in your make recovery tape?

TIA
Brian

[Pedro Sousa]

The best backup sw I know of is Ignite - http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/index.html

You can make backups online. When you need to make a total restore, you'll have your system as it was at the time of the backup, i.e., with the services running, daemons, dbs, ...

[John Bolene]

Not sure if it matters, but just to be safe and to get a good ignite backup, we disconnect the machine from the network while the backup is being made.

Since we have mostly cookie-cutter type machines, we keep a lab/test and a golden image machine that we do this process from.

The lab/test/burndown and restore machine is used for system testing and all patches. If we mess it up, it can be restored in about an hour.

The golden machine is patched after we have tested the patches in the lab and another tape is created. The tape is only used in the event of a hard drive crash.