Quoting Alexander Lazarevich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'd like to know if anyone has restored a client to a blank/new drive > in order to fully bring back the OS. What I mean is this: If a client > disk drive fails, and I need bring that client machine back up ASAP, it > would be quicker if I could restore every single file that was backed > up for the client. If all system/install/data files on the client were > backed up, then the restore should work, right? This would be quicker > than reinstalling all apps, because we have a lot of apps... > > I already tried this. But it didn't work because I was trying to > restore to a drive that was the currently running OS client, and I > think ADSM was unable to restore files that were running processes. So > now I'm going to try and restore to a second clean drive that I installed > in the machine. I also installed a base OS on the second drive, rather > than keeping it a clean drive with a formated filesystem of the OS type. > I'm not sure if one was is better than another. > > I read the ADSM manual, thinking that the section called "Disaster > Recovery" would be just what I'm doing, and it's not. I already know > what my machine specs are, I just need to know if I can trully restore > the OS. > > Cause everything on a computer is a file, right? If that's true then > this should work, right? > > Anyone done this before?
I have done this with Linux, and looked into the possibility of doing it with AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. With Linux I was able to run the restores without installing Linux on a hard disk on the client system. I booted the client from a floppy disk normally used to support OS installation from a network server and connected to an NFS server containing the TSM client and most of the files needed by Linux itself. After I restored the files I had to run a command to rebuild the boot block on the disk. As far as I know, all Unix systems would require some analog of this command after restoring the files on their hard disks. The O'Reilly book "Unix Backup & Recovery" discusses this sort of thing in detail. It does not mention TSM in particular, but does discuss processes for recreating systems from file-oriented backups.
