Fast disaster recovery with veritas net backup???

[jmiturbe]

Hello,

I´m looking for a fast recovery procedure against disasters. I´ve read that the total restore procedure is to reinstall the Operating Environment, reinstall the backup software and finally restore the data. My platform is Sparc-Solaris with a small tape loader.

I supose that the veritas software uses a standard method of copying files at a lower level, so maybe it´s possible to boot from a solaris cdrom and restore a complete backup with conventional unix tools. Can this be done? If it is possible how it´s done?

If not possible, which is the best and fastest method for this kind of recovery?

Thanks in advance,

jmiturbe

 

[PGPhantom]

Two things you should check into - Veritras has an add on product called Bare Metal Restore. If you do not go with that look at IDR - INtelligent Disaster Recovery which is the method we employ.

 

[bswip]

I am currently working on our D/R procedures and am in the process of scripting the whole process.

What it does:

1. Copies the contents of a CD onto the server into a specific directory (/usr/local/dr)

2. Starts installation of the 8_Recommended patches

3. Copies any /etc files you saved on the cdrom

4. Copies any user scripts into /usr/local/bin and adds the path to .profile

5. The cd contains st.conf, vm.conf. bp.conf sg.conf, sg.links and anything else you want to keep cpoies of.

6. Once NB is installed, it will install the NB patches. I know, anyone can do this, but I am logging everything.

7. There are some manual copies you do right now, but until we get more familiar with our D/R I will leave them this way. Eventually this will also be automated.

I am into v1r3 which requires you to view a readme to determine which scripts to run. I am working on v2r0 which will be totally menu driven.

I started this because we needed to document how much time it takes to do a D/R recovery of our master and 2 media servers. The first steps (copying the CD and installing solaris patches is about an hour versus 90 minutes). I also perform a sys-unconfig but only if you want it (ctrl-c to abort the sys-unconfig).

I do perform a lot of error checking and ensure that only the master and media servers can use this CD. The CD currently contains around 540 MB data. It also contains a list of all images that are on your master server in case you need to create a secondary mount point to restore your catalog. In which case, there is a script that you can use to perform this after you have mounted the secondary fs. It will take half your clients and create the directories for them, then link them back to /opt/openv/netbackup/db/images (it will create the directory if it doesn't exist).

The hardest part of D/R and NB is the interaction between the software and the hardware. Our D/R site is fibre-scsi versus our home-site of direct scsi. Although we are moving towards fibre-scsi.

I am willing to share these scripts and perhaps we can all co-develop them so that others can benefit.