Recovering lost data after an unplanned outage

Backup and recovery

It is imperative that you have a proven strategy for backing up your system. The time and money you spend on creating this strategy is more than recovered should you need to restore lost data or perform a recovery. After you have created a strategy, you must ensure that it works by testing it, which involves performing a backup and recovery, and then validating that your data was backed up and restored correctly. If you change anything on your system, you need to assess whether your backup and recovery strategy needs to be changed.

Every system and business environment is different, but you should try to do a full backup of your system at least once a week. If you have a very dynamic environment, you also should back up the changes to objects on your system since the last backup. If you have an unexpected outage and need to recover those objects, you can recover the latest version of them.

To help manage your backup and recovery strategy and your backup media, you can use Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS). BRMS is a program that helps you implement a disciplined approach to managing your backups, and provides you with an orderly way to recover lost or damaged data. Using BRMS, you can manage your most critical and complex backups, including online backups of Lotus® servers, simply and easily. You can also recover your system fully after a disaster or failure.

In addition to these backup and recovery features, BRMS enables you to track all of your backup media from creation to expiration. You no longer need to keep track of which backup items are on which volumes, and worry that you might accidentally write over active data. You can also track the movement of your media to and from offsite locations.

For detailed information about the tasks that BRMS can help you perform, see Backup, Recovery, and Media Services.

For help in planning and managing your backup and recovery strategy, see Selecting the appropriate recovery strategy or contact Business continuity and resiliency .

Limiting the amount of data that is lost

You can group your disk drives into logical subsets called disk pools (also known as auxiliary storage pools or ASPs). The data in one disk pool is isolated from the data in the other disk pools. If a disk unit fails, you only need to recover the data in the disk pool that contains the failed unit.

Independent disk pools are disk pools that can be brought online or taken offline without any dependencies on the rest of the storage on a system. This is possible because all of the necessary system information associated with the independent disk pool is contained within the independent disk pool. Independent disk pools offer a number of availability and performance advantages in both single and multiple system environments.

Logical partitions provide the ability to divide one system into several independent systems. The use of logical partitions is another way that you can isolate data, applications, and other resources. You can use logical partitions to improve the performance of your system, such as by running batch and interactive processes on different partitions. You can also protect your data by installing a critical application on a partition apart from other applications. If another partition fails, that program is protected.