Restore from hydrated tape beside DR

[Mita201]

If I do have container pool copied to tape as hydrated data, is it possible to do restore client data from it while ISP server is in regular operation?
It is audit request, to see if data can be restored from tape.

 

[marclant]

You can, but the directory container pool would have to be unavailable in order to mount the tapes instead of reading from the container pool.

You really should be doing a DR test to do this though. Reading the data from tape is one thing, but the whole DR procedure needs to be tested before a real disaster.

 

[Mita201]

Thanks, I was thinking same way - hide container pool (mount it somewhere else, temporarily).
For the DR test - yes, this is something out of scope of this post. This is a particular requirement by auditors - "show me you can recover data from tape". I was thinking if it can be done without complete DR test, like it can be done with other backup solutions.
So, if I "hide" container pool for this specific purpose (audit), do the restore of copule of files as a demonstration, can I go "back in business" quickly after, like put containers back where they were, maybe restart ISP and live on as nothing happened?

 

[marclant]

Thanks, I was thinking same way - hide container pool (mount it somewhere else, temporarily)

NO, don't do that, bad idea. The server will throw errors, mark a bunch of containers as unavailable, it will be more work to revert it back than needed. Just use the UPDATE STGPOOL command and set the container pool as unavailable. Put it back readwrite after.

If you do a DR test in the future, tell your auditors about it, it would make sense to do the DR test and the audit at the same time.

 

[Mita201]

OK, got it. Thanks!