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Disaster recovery option 2

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stevemoore

IS-IT--Management
May 16, 2000
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I'm thinking of investing in the Arcserve disaster recovery option. Has anyone used/had any experience of it?
 
We've been trying to get DR to work smoothly for about a month. The new DR patches on the web site provide a little better documentation but as usual the ArcServe documentation leaves a lot to desire. We use Dell 2450's and 6450's (W2K SP1 and SP2) with PERC RAID and the DR bootable CD's often crash on a clean systemwith a ntdll.dll error 221
 
Bugger! I bought it for one server and haven't yet tested the CDs (quite difficult getting your hands on a spare Compaq 5500 and a tape library!) was considering getting extra copies for all the servers - but if it doesn't work then I might not bother!

Has anyone got this to work?
 
I've used it...

Running ArcServe 6.61 SP2a on NT4.0, SP5.
IBM Netfinity servers (3500, 5000, 5500, 7000 models)
Tape Library is a Quantum L-500 (re-sold under some cryptic IBM part number) with one DLT IV drive installed. Not currently using the TLO.

Make sure you make all the disks that the Recovery Option requires. You have to make the 3 NT system disks, then run an ArcServe program for DR that edits those disks, then makes two more.

It works fine. It's not the fastest thing I've seen, but it works. I've had to resort to using it twice in the past year...once was an accident (I trashed the RAID array...oops) and it took us the better part of 2 days and some calls to ArcServe to get it to work. We had never tested it before. Since then , I used it to re-structure some RAID arrays on a server and restore all the data back. Took a day to do that including the RAID array setup, but it went very smooth, just time consuming.

I strongly recommend testing the DR option on a test server (can be a regular PC) and documenting all the steps necessary to do the DR procedure. You'll also need to keep your disks in a safe place and current. Re-create them every time there's a major change to your system (ie SPs, ne hardware, new software, etc) Monkeylizard
-Isaiah 35-
 
The DR option brings back file systems only. You must manually recover Exchange, SQL or Oracle databases. This is clearly documented at the end of the DR option manual.

Jim P. Ames
True Data Storage Networks
Arcserve Service
Data Protection and Recovery
212.352.1780
 
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