Restoring the Sun

Chet Gebhards

There have been a number of articles in this magazine and others dealing with backups, but most of these have said little about restoring data. Perhaps it seems a trivial task to drop a tape into a tape drive and issue a few commands to restore the data. Ho hum. But when the system disk crashes at 2:00 a.m. during the most critical period in your company's business cycle, and the CIO (you know, the guy you talked into spending big bucks on a tape library and backup tools) is looking over your shoulder, you had better be able to pull the data out of that fancy backup system in a hurry!

Consider these true stories (the names have been omitted to protect the embarrassed). One site had their backups down to a science. They used a tape silo and sophisticated software to do nightly backups of their Sun servers. And since they had FDDI between the silo and the servers, the backups were very quick. Everything was great until they lost a system disk on one of their servers. No problem, boot from CD-ROM, configure the network interface, and...uh-oh, the Solaris CD-ROM doesn't support FDDI interfaces.

Another site had a single system administrator, who did backups using cron and scripts to a local tape drive. A small system, but critical in the company's business. When that SA got married and went on his honeymoon, he gave one other person the root password, "just in case..." and told him to put new tapes in the drive every night. You guessed it; the system disk crashed the second night of the SA's two-week honeymoon. The SA, of course, had the system configuration all in his head, but he was not checking his voice mail, and he definitely wasn't thinking about UNIX. Nowhere was the system configuration documented on paper. After several hours of hunting around and experimenting, we managed to restore the system to something similar to its previous state.