Best practices: Suggestions for disaster recovery planning
You should have a well-documented and tested plan to recover from a logical error, an operator error, or a site disaster.
Information about disaster recovery is available in the following documents, which are found on the NetBackup Documentation Landing Page:
NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide (See Chapter 4: Disaster recovery)
NetBackup Administrator's Guide, Volumes I & II
NetBackup in Highly Available Environments Administrator's Guide
NetBackup Clustered Primary Server Administrator's Guide
NetBackup Cloud Administrator's Guide
For recovery planning, use the following preparatory measures:
Always use a scheduled catalog backup.
Refer to Catalog Recovery from an Online Backup in the NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide.
Review the disaster recovery plan often.
Review your site-specific recovery procedures and verify that they are accurate and up-to-date. Also, verify that the more complex systems, such as the NetBackup primary and media servers, have procedures for rebuilding the computers with the latest software.
Performance depends on a chain of I/O events. The speed is only as good as the weakest link in that chain. For data recovery, you must consider I/O performance on the source, locality of the data, rehydration performance, and network performance.
A number of NetBackup features optimize recovery, such as Instant Access and Instant Rollback for VMware.
For MSDP-C the best recovery guidance is to have a reasonable amount of free space on the storage to use as a recovery cache.
Perform test recoveries on a regular basis.
Implement a plan to perform restores of various systems to alternate locations. This plan should include selecting random production backups and restoring the data to a non-production system. A checksum can then be performed on one or many of the restored files and compared to the actual production data. Be sure to include off-site storage as part of this testing. The end user or application administrator can also help determine the integrity of the restored data.
Use and protect the NetBackup catalog.
Do the following:
Back up the NetBackup catalog.
The catalog contains information vital for NetBackup recovery. Its loss can result in hours or days of recovery time using manual processes.
Back up the catalog after each backup.
If a catalog backup is used, an incremental catalog backup can be done after each backup session. Busy backup environments should also use a scheduled catalog backup, because their backup sessions end infrequently.
In the event of a catastrophic failure, the recovery of images is slow if some images are not available. If a manual backup occurs shortly before the primary server or the drive that contains the backed-up files crashes, the manual backup must be imported to recover the most recent version of the files.
Regularly confirm the integrity of the NetBackup catalog.
Walk through the process of recovering a catalog from the device that contains the catalog backup on a regular basis, such as quarterly or after major operational or personnel changes. This essential part of NetBackup administration can save hours in the event of a catastrophe.