Creating A Consistent And Relevant Backup; Encrypted Backups - HP Data Protector A.06.11 Recovery Manual

NOTE:
On UNIX systems, some daemons or processes are active as soon as the system finishes
booting, for various reasons (HP-UX example: License server at run level-2). Such an
early process may even read the data into memory and write a "dirty flag" into some
file while it runs. A backup taken at the standard operating stage (the standard run
level-4) cannot be expected to yield a problem-free restart of such an application. To
follow the example, the license server, if started after such a pseudo recovery, will realize
that the data read from the file is inconsistent and will refuse to run the service as
expected.
On Windows, while the system is up and running, many system files cannot be replaced
because the system keeps them locked. For example, the user profiles that are currently
being used cannot be restored. The login account has to be changed or the relevant
service has to be stopped.
Data consistency of an application can be violated depending on what is active on
the system when the backup runs, thereby causing re-start and execution issues after
recovery.

Creating a consistent and relevant backup

• Ideally, you would perform a backup with the relevant partition(s) set off-line,
which is usually not possible.
• Examine the activity on the system during the backup. Only operating system
related processes and database services which are backed up online can remain
active during the backup execution.
• None of the low-level (UNIX) or background-level (Windows) application specific
services should be running.
What should be included in the consistent and relevant backup depends on the
disaster recovery method you plan to use and other system specifics (for example,
disaster recovery of Microsoft Cluster). See the sections pertaining to particular
disaster recovery methods.

Encrypted backups

If your backups are encrypted, you must ensure that the encryption keys are safely
stored and available when you start a disaster recovery. Without the access to the
appropriate encryption key, the disaster recovery procedure aborts.
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