Alternative disaster recovery methods

This section compares the Data Protector disaster recovery concept with concepts of other vendors. This section points out only significant aspects of alternative recovery concepts. Two alternative recovery approaches are discussed:

Recovery methods supported by operating system vendors

Most vendors provide their own methods, but when it comes to restore, they typically require the following steps:

1.Reinstall the operating system from scratch

2.Reinstall the application(s)

3.Restore application(s) data

Excessive manual reconfiguration and customization of the operating system and the application(s) is required to reconstruct the status before the disaster. This is a very complicated, time consuming, and error-prone process using different tools that are not integrated with each other. It does not benefit from a backup of the operating system, the application(s), and their configurations as a whole set.

Recovery using third-party tools (for Windows)

This often consists of a special tool that backs up the system partition as a snapshot, which can be restored rapidly. The method conceptually requires the following steps:

1.Restore the system partition (using the third-party tool)

2.Restore any other partition (perhaps selective) if required using the standard backup tool

It is obvious that one has to work from two different backups with different tools. This is a difficult task to perform on a regular basis. If this concept is implemented for a large organization, the administrative overhead to manage the different versions (weekly backup) for the data from two tools must be addressed.

Data Protector on the other hand represents a powerful all-in-one cross-platform enterprise solution for fast and efficient disaster recovery that includes backup and restore and supports clustering. It provides easy central administration, easy restore, high availability support, monitoring, reporting and notifications to aid administration of systems in a large organization.

Concepts guide

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