Keys to recovering your system

To ensure that you always have a set of emergency recovery media and data backups, we strongly recommend that you:

• Create emergency recovery diskettes and tapes immediately after installing and configuring your system.

  If you install additional system or application software at a later time, create new emergency recovery disks and tapes.

• Back up your system on a regular basis (daily or weekly).

  The length between backups is correlated to the amount of possible data loss. If you back up your system each day, you can only lose up to one day's data. If you only back up your system once a month, up to a month of data might be lost if your hardware fails.

The emergency recovery diskettes contain a small, bootable version of UnixWare^® 7 from which you can boot your system.

The emergency recovery tapes contain an image of critical UnixWare 7 filesystems. If you have the UnixWare 7 NetWare Services product installed and configured, the tapes also contain an image of the NetWare Directory Services (NDS) master partitions and NetWare SYS: volume defined on your system.

By first booting your system with the emergency diskettes and then restoring it from the emergency tapes, you restore all the system software, filesystems, and NDS partitions that existed when you created the diskettes and tapes.

Performing regular system backups ensures that data added to your system after the creation of the emergency recovery media can also be restored. Data created after the most recent backup may be lost if your hard disk fails.

The system owner can back up the entire system on a regular basis. Individual users without owner privileges can perform backups of their own directories.

To ensure that you back up not only data but also any extended file attributes (such as privileges, ACLs, and NetWare file attributes), use ARCserveIT from Computer Associates or cpio.

See ARCserveIT from Computer Associates and the cpio manual page for more information.