Some good questions that come up here quite often.

Yes - the two files are indeed important - they are the NT registry for your
administrator while it is logged on.  Since these files are always locked by
NT while the administrator is logged on (or similar files for a user) they
cannot be backed up.  The recommended solution for this is to build a Bat
file as follows:

DSMC REGBACK USER CURUSER

Put the bat file in your ADSM BACLIENT directory, and put a shortcut in the
Allusers Startup directory, so that whenever someone logs on to NT, the
backup of the registry will take place.  The command will cause the registry
to be written to a directory named ADSM.SYS, and backed up from there.

I have not personally done a disaster recovery test, but several others have
here on the list, perhaps they can recap their details.  I have myself done a
restore of the drive where NT is installed, and I was successful.  I used a
repair partition, however.  The ADSM Disaster Recovery redbook documents how
to do this under 3.51; NT 4.0 is similar.  The only change I made was at
completion of the documented restore process I came up in a Normal
configuration, but my customizations were missing.  I issued a REGREST
command to restore the registry from the ADSM.SYS, then rebooted and
everything was back.

As of late, there has also been some discussion here about recovering an NT
machine like we do with Win95 - install to a temp directory, configure IP,
install ADSM to a temp dir also, then restore the whole configuration.

And lastly, there was a note today from Greg Van Hise of IBM on a new product
to do disk image restores - sounds promising.

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com


______________________________ Forward Header __________________________________
Subject: Need some info for Win NT Files
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    2/18/98 3:32 PM


Hi,
   We have been doing backups using ADSM ver 3 on a NT 4.0 server. While
the backup runs , the activity logs shows that  the following files are
not backed up.

C:\WINNT\Profiles\ADMINISTRATOR\ntuser.dat.log
C:\WINNT\Profiles\ADMINISTRATOR\ntuser.dat

It says access denied. Are these file important when doing disaster
recovery ? If they are needed, we cannot restore it as its not getting
backed up.How do u back them up then ?
   Thanks for the help in advance. If anyone has done a full blown
disaster recovery using ADSM on Win Nt 40  how have you gone about it ?
Is there any otherway besides using repair partition ?

 Vinu Simon