ARCServe v11 Newbie

[technical1]

Hi,
Im thinking of purchasing ARCServe v11 soon.
I have a windows 2000/iis 5 environment and Windows 2000/SQL 2000 servers.

My question is:
1) Do i need the SQL agent if im running SQL Backup and transaction log backups. After the SQL backup, the .bak and .trn files are available for backup. So is the SQL agent needed?

2) Open file agent. Im running IIS5 and ColdFusion server MX. Do i need the open file agent to backup a web server?

3) Does the disaster recovery actually work. Has anyone been saved by the disaster recovery and rebuilt there entire server?

Any feedback would be great.

Regards,
Vinay

 

[davidmichel]

1) Sounds like your talking about a SQL dump to disk. If your happy with that then sure that's fine and the SQL agent is not neeeded.

2) Try it first without OFA, you can always add it.

3) Yes, but! and that is a big "but". It works great for standard configurations, but once you start getting into the vast variety of configurations problems can come up. Everyone I have come across that had a standard server with direct attached storage had no complaints with DR. Most that did have complaints had tried a DR recovery for the first time when their system went down, and DR to different hardware is also another big cause of failures.

 

[technical1]

Hi David,
Thanks for your reply.
Would the Disaster recovery option backup the entire OS and data on a server? or would you need a Open file agent. Surely windows OS files are presumably locked all the time.

Regards,
Vinay

 

[davidmichel]

Disaster Recover has nothing to do with backing the data up. DR creates a temp install of windows so that it is seen as a system on the network (for remote DR) and the data can be restored. It does not know or care what data was backed up. It will use a generic install of Windows and a machine specific disk to supply drivers specific to that system.

 

[goldman]

I was under the impression that in order to use DRO, the Primary partition had to be no greater than 4G. Is this still a limitation?