We have a Meridian Mail system and want to know if we can "mirror" the drive as a "backup". I currently run full backups nightly, however, if we were to lose the drive, we would like to have a spare drive mirrored to just switch out and load the backup tape. Does anyone know if this is possible? Thanks for your help!
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Meridian Mail -Can drive be mirrored?
- Thread starter jimenezdc
- Start date
if you add a hd to the mail, yes. nortel would need to lic it and you would have a second hd, but the second hd is for mb and voice storage and does not has the full os. to remove a scsi and clone it in a lab is not a nortel supported function but doable for someone with a unix background.. (not me) but i have worked at a military site that went through this once a year.. not that good of idea imo.. any backup older then 10 days is a waste. backup your mb every day to a tape of the day. then do a single friday night complete backup.. big news flash, a complete backup is not reloadable if the os is corrupt.. we had that happen, full backup once a week, tape had been in the machine for years, box crashes, no usuable space on the hd.. replace the hd and do the install. restore from backup, that formats the disk, backup os would not load, so the user data was lost.. 1800 users and 30 plus menus to put back in from memorey... i would buy a hd, put it in the box, do the install, restore users from a partial, then use the new hd, keeping the old far a backup... once a month if your looking for something that is worth booting off of..
after the 1st month, put the old one back in, restore off of the latest tape... lots of work but that depends on IF you want that much backup and can handle that much down time
john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc
after the 1st month, put the old one back in, restore off of the latest tape... lots of work but that depends on IF you want that much backup and can handle that much down time
john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc
ArchTelecom
IS-IT--Management
For the purpose of backing up your system so you don't have to reconfigure in case of HD failure you could use a drive duplicator which copies bit for bit including formatting. Obviously your mailbox storage data would be old but your config would be as it was at the time of backup. This may be OK if you never or seldomly change any configuration. I am not sure of how legal that would be. Many IT departments have these duplicators. I know it works.
That being said, as John pointed out previously, the backup, even for configuration sake, may become old quickly. In many systems, depending on the size and nature of dynamics, you may be making changes daily.
On larger systems, best to use the traditional backup methods. On smaller OPT11's I personally document my system configuration so I could easily rebuild it. I am too distributed to do backups regulary and cost effectively on small voicemail systems. LArge ones are well worth the cost and time.
That being said, as John pointed out previously, the backup, even for configuration sake, may become old quickly. In many systems, depending on the size and nature of dynamics, you may be making changes daily.
On larger systems, best to use the traditional backup methods. On smaller OPT11's I personally document my system configuration so I could easily rebuild it. I am too distributed to do backups regulary and cost effectively on small voicemail systems. LArge ones are well worth the cost and time.
- Thread starter
- #6
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions! This is great. Are these drives just a standard drive or do they have to be "Nortel" drives? This system was installed a few years ago, so how do I find out what the specs are for the drive? Unable to find any documentation from the install. Once we mirror a drive, could we just load the latest backup tape to bring it up to the most current data? No, we do not want to add a drive to voicemail, we just want a "spare" drive ready to go if we lose the MerMail drive.
there are several options available for backing up your mail system.
1. tape
2. clone disk utility
3. disk shadowing
We have 11 Meridian Mail (modular option) systems running release 13. All have disk shadowing. If we lose a disk, we replace the bad disk and syncronize the replaced disk with the remaining good disk in a node.
1. tape
2. clone disk utility
3. disk shadowing
We have 11 Meridian Mail (modular option) systems running release 13. All have disk shadowing. If we lose a disk, we replace the bad disk and syncronize the replaced disk with the remaining good disk in a node.
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