Successful System Recovery using Ignite-UX

If the recovery archive contains any application files, you should ignore these files. The data or
program files belonging to the application are likely to have changed. Always recover your
application programs and data using your application backup solution. You may consider
excluding application programs and data from all recovery archives you create.
Important:
It is necessary that you have identified precisely which files comprise
your applications, including any operating system configuration files that
require modification to support the operation of the application.
Operating system files to be recovered
To recover the operating system, you would normally recover very specific files such as the
following:
/etc/passwd
/etc/group
In addition, you would recover other configuration files that you may have modified since the last
time that you created the recovery archive. If you are recovering applications from different
systems on to one system, you must identify and resolve duplicates in the /etc/passwd and
/etc/group files (ideally, you have standards for enforcing the uniqueness of a UID and GID in
your environment). This is not relevant if you use a central repository for user information such as
LDAP, NIS or NIS+ although in a business resumption situation you would need to get the central
repository working before any applications would be operational.
You would not recover files such as the following:
/etc/lvmtab
/etc/rc.config.d/*
/dev or any subdirectories or files
/etc/ioconfig or /stand/ioconfig
After cloning a system to perform your business resumption plan and after changing the IP address
of the system because it was at a different location, you would not recover any files from your
backup tapes like /etc/hosts as it would contain old IP address information. If you know you
have changes in /etc/hosts that must be merged into the file currently on the system, recover the
file to a different directory, then make the changes manually. Similarly, if you had to change the
hostname of the system during the recovery, you should avoid recovering files that contain the old
hostname.
Summary
A recovery archive strategy is not complete until is has been effectively designed, tested and
proven to operate successfully. The topics presented in this white paper for your consideration can
aid you in this effort and provide useful guidelines that can be applied to your environment.
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