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Crash Recovery

Overview of RecoverEDGE

For OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, Linux, and UnixWare 7.1, BackupEDGE includes the RecoverEDGE Bare Metal Disaster Recovery package. By using this tool, you may create emergency recovery floppy diskettes, DVDs, CDs, REVs, OBDR^tm or DRTape^tm bootable tapes to rebuild your system in the case of a catastrophic hardware failure. RecoverEDGE handles the details of reconstructing your FDisk, divvy, and/or slice tables, rebuilding your filesystems and restoring your data, even if your hard drive size and / or geometry has changed. RecoverEDGE uses your live system backups, so there is no need to shut down your system in order to protect it.

RecoverEDGE also has advanced networking capabilities. It can recover your system from a backup in a remote device or from an FTP Backup. So, even systems without local archive devices installed can receive the full benefit of RecoverEDGE. If you need to recover a system but are not near it, you may find the remote control capabilities of RecoverEDGE useful. You may telnet or modem into a system while it is booted from the recovery media, and see exactly what you would see if you were at the console. You may also connect and disconnect at will.

RecoverEDGE for Linux, SCO OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, and UnixWare 7.1 provides significant protection from hardware failures by eliminating the need to reinstall a base operating system and reconstruct your filesystems.  Combined with its powerful network features, it is an indispensible tool for system administrators.

For DVD, CD, REV, OBDR and DRTape devices, your nightly backups can be made bootable. That way, your nightly backups are a self-contained Crash Recovery solution.

Details of RecoverEDGE

RecoverEDGE is a Crash Recovery (also called Disaster Recovery or Boot-Recovery) tool that enables quick and easy recovery from any data loss, even if a system will no longer boot. Plus, it can be used for normal system maintenance, such as defragmenting filesystems, repartitioning drive space, swapping hard drives, and more!

RecoverEDGE is available for Linux, SCO OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, and Unixware 7.1. This following describes the features that are common to all.

Without RecoverEDGE

If you had a total system failure (i.e., your system would not boot), and you didn't have RecoverEDGE, you would resort to the following procedure to recover your data:

• Identify and correct the cause of the failure.
• Reconfigure the hard drive(s) and reinstall a base operating system using the standard UNIX install procedure.
• Install any device drivers needed to access your tape drive.
• Configure and mount any additional filesystems.
• Restore your backups.
• Shut down and reboot.

Reinstalling a base operating system and any needed device drivers is usually a very time consuming process. More than half of all recovery time is usually spent during this phase.

With RecoverEDGE

On the other hand, if you used RecoverEDGE, restoring your system would become easy:

• Identify and correct the cause of the failure.
• Boot from the RecoverEDGE boot media or network image.
• Select "One-Touch Restore" to automatically reconfigure your filesystems and restore from tape.
• Shut down and reboot.

With RecoverEDGE, system recovery takes just a few seconds to prepare the filesystems and start the restore. Then, after a reboot, your system is totally operational. You don't need to worry about hard drive size changes, either, since RecoverEDGE can automatically scale your filesystems to fit!

Intelligent Disaster Recovery

RecoverEDGE is designed to adapt to your system, not the other way around. When making boot media, it will attempt to shrink the media copy of the UNIX kernel by removing line number information and the symbol table, so a larger kernel can be used than would normally fit. You may also configure specific parameters to make your boot kernel more efficient.

During media creation, RecoverEDGE automatically detects the number of filesystems, number of hard drives, etc., so it knows exactly what steps must be taken to repair your system.

It detects and ignores any mounted CD-ROM's, NFS-mounted filesystems, and RAM disks. Plus, it provides you with a complete system report so even a novice system administrator can see exactly how the system is configured. During recovery, it can automatically recreate (while resizing, if necessary) your filesystems, and restore your entire system. If you wish, you may make any manual adjustments as well, making RecoverEDGE a powerful reconfiguration tool.

A comprehensive Hard Disk Status Report can be viewed or printed. This report details all aspects of your system drive and host adapter configuration.

Easy Disaster Recovery

RecoverEDGE has a menu interface that can automatically rebuild all your filesystems.  There is no guesswork as to when a particular program must be run, or what its command-line arguments are, because Recover EDGE runs the programs for you! If you do wish to make manual adjustments, simply refer to the RecoverEDGE Hard Disk Status Report for the appropriate information about your original system, and change the configuration as desired.

If your primary drive has lost its parameter table or boot record, RecoverEDGE allows you to simply rewrite those without destroying any data, making such repairs extremely quick and painless.

Remote Disaster Recovery

RecoverEDGE allows boot-recovery from network (FTP/FTPS) backups, or from machines that must use a remote tape device to access the archive. When booted from the RecoverEDGE media or image, TCP/IP is started, and remote backups can be read.

RecoverEDGE also supports disaster recovery controlled from a serial or TCP/IP connection.

Filesystem Modifications

RecoverEDGE can be used to resize any of your filesystems or swap space in a fraction of the time it would normally take. RecoverEDGE also offers a Root-Only restore option for reconfiguring only the root filesystem without affecting any other drives.  The "One-Touch" restore option also allows you to restore only the primary hard drive.

Where Do I Get RecoverEDGE?

RecoverEDGE is included with every copy of Microlite BackupEDGE for supported operating systems. This includes SCO OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, Linux 2.4.x (IA32) and 2.6.x (IA32, EM64T and AMD64), and UnixWare 7.1.

BackupEDGE, RecoverEDGE, and Bootable Backups, and OneTouch Restore are trademarks of Microlite Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are those of their respective owners.