Strategies for backup and recovery, Protecting cluster data – Dell PowerVault NX1950 User Manual

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Strategies for Backup and Recovery

You can use the backup and recovery solutions available with the Dell|Equallogic
to ensure high availability for your Dell™ PowerVault™ NX1950 cluster solution.
The following sections address these areas and present possible solutions.

Protecting Cluster Data

There are four specific areas to protect with backups to ensure high
availability for your cluster nodes:

•

Cluster disk signatures and partitions.
Before you begin to backup any data on the cluster nodes, make sure you
backup the cluster disk signatures and partitions using the Automated
System Recovery in the Backup Wizard for Windows. If you have to
restore the signature of the quorum disk later, it is critical to have a copy
from which to restore. For example, you must restore the signature of the
quorum disk if you experience a complete system failure and the signature
of the quorum disk changed since the last backup.

•

Cluster quorum resource.
When you backup data on a cluster node, make sure you also backup the
quorum resource. The quorum resource is important because it contains
the current cluster configuration, application registry checkpoints, and the
cluster recovery log.

•

Shared disks.
To back up all shared disks owned by a node, perform a full backup from
that node. If a shared disk owned by the node that is being backed up fails
over to another node during the backup process, the backup set does not
contain a full backup of that disk.

•

Data on the individual cluster nodes.
After you back up the quorum resource on one node, it is not necessary to
back up the quorum resource on the remaining cluster nodes. However,
you may want to back up the clustering software, cluster administrative
software, system state, and application data on the remaining nodes.

NOTE:

If you back up the system state for a node, you also automatically back up

the quorum data if the cluster service is running on that node.

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