You can best use the Stand-alone Disk Image Dump and Restore program to back up the primary disk drive on a machine. The primary disk drive contains the operating system and most programs. On a Windows NT system, for example, the primary disk is often the c: drive, which contains the Windows NT system partition and the Windows NT boot directory. Because the disk image backup requires you to shut down your production environment and boot the machine using the program diskettes, you may not want to do the backup often. Also, files on the primary disk tend to change less often than application data, requiring less frequent backup.
Use the ADSM backup-archive client together with this program to maintain a more complete backup of a machine. Use the backup-archive client to back up files that change between image backups. When you use the backup-archive client to back up the disk, the initial backup essentially copies the files on the disk. (Note that this is different from the sector-by-sector copying done by the image backup.) Later incremental backups by the backup-archive client ensure that the ADSM server has current backup copies of files.
When you need to restore the primary disk, restore the disk image first. Then restore any files changed since that image was created by using the backup-archive client and restoring files with the IFNEWER option. For more information about installing and using the ADSM backup-archive client, see ADSM V3 Installing the Clients and the appropriate user guide for the backup-archive client.
| Note: | When you restore files by using the backup-archive client, the files that ADSM restores can include files that were deleted from the disk after the disk image was created. As a result, you may not have enough space on the disk. Delete or move files to make enough space for the restore operation to complete. |
For disk drives that mainly contain data that changes frequently, use the ADSM backup-archive client to maintain backup versions in ADSM storage.