One Button Disaster Recovery.

A Good Idea Put To A Few Tests

"The world will little note, nor long remember ..." The modest words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address prove testament to the fact that, sometimes, simple events can have considerable impact.

Although the results won't earn immortality, a modest addition to Hewlett-Packard's DDS product line could well outweigh the impact of much louder announcements about other products. One Button Disaster Recovery (OBDR) was quietly added in to HP's backup hardware this May. It's to be included on most current and future drives from HP.

The basics behind this feature are simple: when a disaster occurs, shut down the computer, turn off the HP drive, and while pressing the Eject button on the drive, turn it back on. This changes the personality of the drive from Tape Drive to Bootable CD. On systems that can boot from a CD, when the system is restarted, it boots from the HP drive.

The system then asks if you want to restore your operating system. If you tell it yes, the boot records are read from the tape in the drive, and the system restarts. Once the system has restarted, your operating system can be restarted and you can use the backup software to restore the rest of your damaged or missing files.

It should be obvious that the restored system is only as current as the last backup. This is a good argument for frequent backups and frequent incremental updates. However, in the event of a disaster, having a rapid method for rebuilding and restoring operating system files (often in just minutes) can be worth the possible loss of system files that may have been updated after the tape was made.

The OBDR feature is built into the drive hardware. At the time of this writing, Replica Backup software (from Stac Software, Inc.) included with the drives supports the OBDR feature. According to HP, other software developers were adding support for this feature to their latest versions of software.

THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

In theory, OBDR is little short of a miracle. The demonstration that HP gives is little short of amazing.

As a long time sufferer from the complexities and ambiguities of system recovery, the idea of OBDR is very attractive. My test system has presented major problems to nearly every software package in one way or another.

Currently, the basic frustration is that the floppy disk created by the backup programs use drivers that don't work. This is probably because newer drivers for my Adaptec controllers are required. The result is simple--I'm usually not able to successfully boot and restart the system using these disks.

Substituting the correct DOS drivers for the ones on the floppy disk will probably work--but this is a workaround that shouldn't be necessary. I'm not entirely convinced that even using the latest drivers will successfully load the system and launch the restore program. The inability to launch the restore process because of problems loading drivers give the concept of one button disaster recovery a stellar glow.

In my testing, the magic wasn't entirely there. I used the "test system from hell" to run a SureStore DAT24 through its paces. With hardware compression turned on, tapes with a native capacity of 12GB and an estimated compressed capacity of 24GB averaged around 14GB per tape. A backup of 40GB onto three tapes took roughly nine hours--and had to be cancelled when the third tape filled up with roughly 60MB left to back up. Restoring to the system had the potential to be something of a problem--and it was.

My system has an IDE drive and three SCSI hard drives. In order to boot to the SCSI drive, a setting had to be made in the BIOS instructing the system to boot from SCSI. With this option set, my SCSI boot drive became Drive C and the IDE drive became Drive D. So far, so good.

In order to use OBDR, the BIOS had to be told to boot from CD. When this option was set, the system changed the drive order with the IDE drive again becoming Drive C. The suggested solution (which actually makes a lot of sense) was to put the hard drive onto the second IDE channel, which theoretically forces the computer to look to SCSI for a boot disk.

To make a long story short, as it relates to my system from hell, it took a while to realize that OBDR only works on NT. My HP tech support contact, as well as myself, fell into a trap that could be a problem for some HP support people--the Windows 95/98 software that ships with the SureStore DAT24 and other tape drives installs a module called One Button Backup. Unfortunately, this sounds too much like One Button Disaster Recovery.

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

As was pointed out by HP, there probably won't be many people using a $1000+ drive on a system worth the same or less. The real target for OBDR and the drives that it is built into are the NT-class servers, where a tape drive priced like a DAT24 (or better) is still well within range--especially considering the cost of the server and the value of the data it holds. Testing the drive on my system, which is clearly an anomaly (AMD K63-400MHz, 256MB RAM, 50+GB hard drive, etc.), running Windows 98 is pretty far from real world. With NT running on this hardware platform, the test would make a lot more sense.

Determined to test OBDR on a more appropriate platform, I decided to finally build the server I had been threatening to put together for many months. As a backup, HP sent a Vectra server, into which a DAT24 drive was installed, the Replica backup/restore software was installed and sample OBDR tapes were already recorded.

IT WORKED AS PROMISED

My first step, once I received the server and the test tapes, was to finish building my server, and putting OBDR to a real test--restoring a drive that was completely clean. My new server (as opposed to the Vectra) was using a Kingston 366MHz K6-2 upgrade, had 128MB of RAM, an Adaptec 2940U2W controller card, and a Seagate Cheetah 18GB LVD hard drive. The drive was new, unformatted, and ready for recovery.

OBDR appeared to work. The system loaded the recovery data when it was booted and the data was copied onto the hard drive. The system restarted automatically. Windows NT began to load. A useless error message telling me to change some settings in NT (which wouldn't load) froze the process. My guess was that the version of NT that was stored onto the OBDR tape was adequate for the basic server HP provided, but didn't have the service pack updates, or the drivers needed for my 2940U2W card. When the NT boot process got to loading the SCSI HBA, an error was produced.

I'm happy to report that OBDR worked flawlessly on the HP server. OBDR was designed to restore the system based on the last backup. To demonstrate this, I performed a backup using Replica, based on the status of the system on an early Sunday afternoon.

I turned off the machine, restarted it (with the eject button pressed), and OBDR launched. After responding to the confirmation prompt, OBDR copied the system files onto the hard disk, then restarted the computer. I was prompted to confirm that I wanted to restore my files and the system was restored to its state at backup.

Later, I used an OBDR tape that was made a few days earlier, before the server was shipped. Again, I ran through the OBDR process and the system was restored. However, as expected, the system was restored to the status at the time of backup. If any hardware were added after backup, drivers would probably have to be reinstalled.

WHERE IS CREDIT DUE?

Hewlett-Packard may not have specifically claimed credit for developing OBDR, but its materials come pretty close. A video announcing OBDR features an engineer who reportedly conceived of the idea.

Stac claims that the concept was developed by them and licensed to HP for use on its servers and DAT8 and DAT24 drives. Replica, which includes OBDR capabilities integrated into the software, is included with these drives.

OBDR won't work on every system. Some systems can detect a bootable CD-ROM and will be able to load the OBDR tape. Others lack this capability and don't support OBDR. For these machines, a floppy disk preparation utility is also included in Replica. If you can't use OBDR as a bootable CD-ROM, having floppy disks with the driver files necessary to control the drive can be the next best thing.

One Button Disaster Recovery is a great idea. If you make frequent backups, OBDR can quickly bring many systems back up if the system crashes and the machine can't be booted.

Fortunately, for most of us, such a disastrous crash isn't an everyday occurrence, With luck, and the proper alignment of the planets, OBDR may never be needed. However, if and when it is, OBDR can be one of those nice little things that is darned near worth its weight in gold--in fact, considering the cost of downtime, perhaps it already is.

Using Replica software, the OBDR component is automatically recorded onto backup tapes. No user intervention is required to get Replica to save the important system data that is needed to restart the system.

OBDR won't work with every computer. Many of the newer servers with the ability to boot from CD-ROM will work with OBDR. For those that don't, as stated above, a set of floppy disks can be used to address the drive and begin restoral.

At the time of this writing, software support for OBDR was only available in Replica. However, sources close to HP indicate that many of the major backup software vendors will soon add OBDR support to their backup offerings. HP's new DDS4 drive, which will soon begin shipping, also includes OBDR.

In the past, Hewlett-Packard has sold products based on the company's reputation for quality and support. When it comes to tape storage, the addition of OBDR to the basic features of the drives may be an even more compelling argument. Although the world may neither note little, nor long remember the launch of OBDR, any IT manager who is able to quickly and easily recover from disaster won't soon forget it.