Unix Backup and Recovery

Step 3: Organize Everything

Good organization is really the key to a good disaster recovery plan. If you have hundreds or thousands of backup volumes but can’t find them if you need them, what good are they? There is also the physical layout of the servers themselves. If they are all laid out in a standard way, recovering from a disaster is a whole lot simpler than if each server has its own unique layout.

Standardized Server/Disk Layout

Standardizing the layout of your servers is one of the more difficult things to do, since server configurations and OS configurations change over time. Look at the following list for some of the ways you can standardize, and standardize where you can. Experience has shown that it is worth the trouble to go back and restandardize. That is, it is worth the trouble to reimplement your new standard on your old servers.

The root disk

This should be your standard everywhere. Keep your OS on one disk if possible. Recovering an OS that is spread out on multiple disks is very difficult. Also, keep the partitioning (or LVM partitioning) of all of your OS disks consistent. You don’t want to have to remember, “Oh yeah, this is the one with 1 MB of swap . . .”

Same-size disks

Partition all of your same-size disks exactly the same way, if possible. Consistency makes swapping them in and out very easy and gives you a lot of flexibility.

Same-function disks

If you have disks that serve the same purpose, partition them in the same way.

Database data disk

Decide on the ...