First consider how crucial your data is for your company. What's the impact.
If the recovery can last a while it's up to you. As for the recovery itself
read the manual, it states that as for sql and exchange you must follow the
appropriate procedures in order to recover. IDR will not do that for you.
In order to facilitate the proces and make it unattended be sure the mediaset
used for the backup is in the IDR set otherwise you must attend. Overall,
it helps and speed up things since you don't have to look for your sources
as for OS and hot-fixes.

If you can afford it and speed is crucial really consider the functionality
and the procedures you have to uphold and maintain in order to safeguard
against such a disaster

John
Jay Levitt wrote:
>I recently managed to overwrite my media server during a restore (don't

>ask me how) and had to do a complete OS and BEWS reinstall before I
>could do the proper restore. This got me thinking about IDR, but then

>I saw the price. Does it actually offer any benefits over the complete-
>reinstall method *other* than time-to-completion? Is there data that
>can't be recreated that way?
>
>--
>Jay Levitt |
>Wellesley, MA | Hi!
>Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
>http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?

In article <41c80da7@ROSASTDMZ05.>, jc.otte@mindef.nl says...
> First consider how crucial your data is for your company. What's the impact.

I should have given more details. This is for a home/home office
installation; I back up two Windows XP workstations and a Linux server.
The data is critical, but recovery time is not as much - 20 minutes or a
few hours doesn't make a huge difference to me here, as it would in the
corporate world. I have no databases (other than Linux databases which
appear as standard files to Veritas). My backups currently don't span
multiple tapes, and all the tapes are online in a 10-cartridge VXA-2
library.

> If the recovery can last a while it's up to you. As for the recovery itself
> read the manual, it states that as for sql and exchange you must follow the
> appropriate procedures in order to recover. IDR will not do that for you.
> In order to facilitate the proces and make it unattended be sure the mediaset
> used for the backup is in the IDR set otherwise you must attend. Overall,
> it helps and speed up things since you don't have to look for your sources
> as for OS and hot-fixes.
>
> If you can afford it and speed is crucial really consider the functionality
> and the procedures you have to uphold and maintain in order to safeguard
> against such a disaster

So, just to be clear, the only advantage would be speed and simplicity,
but if I reinstall the OS, BEWS, and its attendant hotfixes myself, I'm
doing everything IDR would do, only slower. Right?

Jay

>
> John
> Jay Levitt wrote:
> >I recently managed to overwrite my media server during a restore (don't
>
> >ask me how) and had to do a complete OS and BEWS reinstall before I
> >could do the proper restore. This got me thinking about IDR, but then
>
> >I saw the price. Does it actually offer any benefits over the complete-
> >reinstall method *other* than time-to-completion? Is there data that
> >can't be recreated that way?
>

--
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | Hi!
Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?

Jay Levitt wrote:

> So, just to be clear, the only advantage would be speed and simplicity,
> but if I reinstall the OS, BEWS, and its attendant hotfixes myself, I'm
> doing everything IDR would do, only slower. Right?

IDR is great in theory. If you have spare servers lying around and
enough staff to test IDR on all of them and know how to keep it
perfectly up-to-date, and how to deal with low-level drivers, broken
RAID sets, disparate hardware etc. etc. then it's great.

But for most SoHo people, my guess is that they reach for IDR and get
greeted by a blue screen or "can't continue" message.

The real advantage of IDR is you get a perfect version of your server
back, you maybe changed and updated 200,000 items since you built it and
IDR will put them all back just like it was last night.

I currently use CD-ROMs for disaster recovery, custom built for each
server but all they do is bring it back to a brand new (but fully
patched) o/s. I then have to install BE and restore manually. I then
have a script to re-create share points and printers.

--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)