Completing recovery drills

Schedule disaster recovery drills to prepare for audits that certify the recoverability of the IBM Spectrum® Protect server and to ensure that data can be restored and operations can resume after an outage. A drill also helps you ensure that all data can be restored and operations resumed before a critical situation occurs.

About this task

With a multisite disk solution, use node replication to ensure that data is available on a target server at recovery site and recovery time is fast. When there is an outage, the source server can automatically fail over to a target server for data recovery. If a disaster occurs and the source server is unavailable, client nodes can automatically record information about the target replication server in the client options file. You might need to manually update the client options file for older clients.

Procedure

  1. Manually restore data from a target replication server, update the client options file to point to the target replication server. Changes to node replication settings are not required.
  2. Configure a client node to store data on a target replication server.
    Restriction: Client nodes that normally back up data to a source replication server cannot back up data to the client nodes that are replicated on the target replication server.
  3. Test client data recovery by completing the following steps:
    1. Restore the client system to a similar operating system. Use the same file system names with same amount of file space in the file system
    2. On a system that has enough space for the data, restore the data.
    3. Verify that the client restored successfully. For example, if you restore a virtual machine, verify that the virtual machine powers on and check that the files are available.