Computer Associates ARB6002700WF0. ..... Administration Guide - Page 54

Planning for Catastrophe Expense In general, the more secure a vault is, the more expensive it is to use. You pay more for more secure storage facilities. It often takes longer to get media to and from these facilities. The more media you store off-site, the more you have to buy for your main site. Deciding What to Archive Because catastrophes will, by definition, strike your infrastructure as well as your backup media, you should assume that you will have to rebuild systems completely before you can start the actual data recovery. For this reason, you should always maintain the following off site: ■ Media elements that contain bootable operating systems for the BrightStor ARCserve Backup servers. ■ A current, complete backup of the file systems, databases, and mail servers supported by BrightStor ARCserve Backup. You may want to include BrightStor ARCserve Backup distribution media and a text file that lists your hardware configuration parameters. Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan To be sure that your data is available after a disaster, you have to periodically test the data that you are archiving. Routine file-backup routines get tested every time a user cannot restore a deleted file. You soon hear about problems and, in general, the results are not too costly. But disasters are, by definition, rare and expensive. When your data center has just burned down, it is too late to find out that your backup routine does not work. So be sure to test these infrequently used processes on a regular basis. Whenever you install new software or hardware, or change existing procedures, complete the following tests: ■ Backup to media as you would for off-site storage and disaster recovery. ■ Verify that the backup operation stored all the specified data successfully. ■ Simulate a post-catastrophe recovery operation using the backup media from the test. You should also run brief, simulated, backup and restore operations whenever the opportunity arises. Routine testing lets you exercise and assess your storage processes on an ongoing basis. 2-16 Administrator Guide