This chapter describes how you should use ARCserveIT to best protect your data in the event of a system failure - either on your servers or hosts, or both. For detailed information on restoring your data see, Chapter 7, "Restoring your data".
The single most important thing you can do to ensure against data loss is to maintain current backups of all your UNIX clients. If you do not have these backups, then ARCserveIT is limited in its ability to recover against data loss or disaster. You may opt to use ARCserveIT's GFS Rotation feature to help you in this goal. GFS Rotation can help you best design a complete backup schema so that a current backup is always possible.
Whenever you back up your entire ARCserveIT host, ARCserveIT's databases are backed up as well. If you use GFS Rotation, the databases are backed up automatically, no matter what targets are included in the GFS Rotation set. Always maintain a current backup of your ARCserveIT database files so that recovering from a disaster is made easier.
Consider the following example:
If you make a full backup of all UNIX clients every Friday. Monday through Thursday, a differential backup is performed, containing any files that have changed since the last full backup.
If something happens to any node in between full backups, then you can recover using the last full backup made and the most recent differential backup which contains all the modifications to the data since the last full backup. For a more complete description of backups and GFS Rotation, refer to Chapter 6, "Using GFS Rotation". The following sources will be useful:
In addition, you should have the appropriate installation disks/media with you.
Follow the instructions included in the next few sections to recover your hosts.