On 5/8/06, Noll, Ralph <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I' using IBM's TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) I installed the tsm client and away I go
Did you also try to recover your system? As Alan pointed out:
Backups are easy. Meaningful backups are less so.
Actually, even meaningful backups are not that hard. It's those darned restore jobs that appear to be the problem - good thing you don't need to restore very often ;-) And you all know this... but try to picture what it takes to recover your server from your backups. Does your scheme allow you to recover your server when nothing is left? Do you need to format the disks yourself first, or do you first need to install a fresh system yourself (can you still do that the way you did it when the bad things happened that required the restore)? Will the restores complete on schedule even when you need to recover a lot of servers? Or if you plan to restore an old physical backup first and then recover on file-level, will that old system still be able to run, connect to the network, run your backup client, allow login with passwords you know, etc. And would such file-level recovery maybe attempt to restore glibc libraries by the latest version and make your restore come to a grinding halt? And have you looked at the cost of doing the backup? Some backup clients have a scheme for file selection that requires them to read all metadata. Running such a backup will make the otherwise idle server consume a large amount of memory and cpu cycles. It has been a while since I cared about this kind of things. I strongly belief in an approach that allows easy (automated) rebuild of a server from scratch, including all (security) updates and changes that were applied to the server in its former life. A framework like WebSphere allows the application code to be deployed on the empty system from a separate development server, which is probably wiser than dealing with the files yourself. After that, all that's left is the application data, in case the application does have data inside. Many applications store the real data in a separate database that can be backed up and recovered with specific tools. I have talked to a lot of people who don't backup their individual servers but rely on an approach to rebuild them. Especially with Linux on z/VM this offers a lot of advantages. Rob -- Rob van der Heij Velocity Software, Inc http://velocitysoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
