>> I'm planning to do a weekly export of all active files to a tape and keep
>> this one offsite in a safe. So in case of a disaster, I should be able to
>> restore all the computers back to the state at the beginning of the week.
Is
>> this a good strategy? (I haven't met any disasters yet and I'm not
looking
>> forward to it either).
>
>There was a time when this was a very popular approach to offsite disaster
>recovery, but most sites abandoned it in favor of copy storage pools when
>that facility became available. One of the advantages of copy storage pools
is
>that they make it relatively cheap to update the offsite information on a
>daily basis. A once a week offsite backup runs the risk of losing up to a
week
>of recent update activity. Few businesses can really tolerate that much
>disruption today.
>
>> Beside the offsite tape, what other information is required to recover
the
>> computer park? I guess that the filesystems of the servers you want to
>> restore should match the filesystems before the disaster. Further on, you
>> need of course the *sm server and client software. Am I overseeing other
>> important information?
>
>Regardless of whether you use export or copy storage pools, you will need a
>means of providing each replacement client system with a functioning
operating
>system and ADSM client software. IBM has a couple of useful red books
>available on bare metal recovery. My one major reservation about these
books
>is that they gloss over the difficulties presented by a replacement system
>with a different hardware configuration than the original system
(especially
>in the case of Windows NT).
>