About Protecting Archiving File System Data

To protect the data on archiving file systems, you can schedule recovery points for the file systems and you can archive copies of files from the file systems to archive media. A recovery point contains all the metadata for a complete archiving file system at a single point in time.

File data consists of the actual files and directories of a file system. Metadata consists of information about that file data. In particular, metadata is data about files, file paths, the inodes for files, directories, access control limits, symbolic links, removable media, segmented files, and the indexes of segmented files. Before lost file data can be retrieved from archive media, the metadata must be restored.

When a recovery point is created through the browser interface, it contains all the metadata for the file system, including pointers to the archive locations for each file. By using this metadata, the SAM-QFS Manager software can recover file data. Store recovery point files separately from the file system to ensure that they are available if the file system is lost.

With archiving file systems, the archiver, which is a component of the Sun SAM software, can copy file data to archive media. This protects the data because it enables you to retrieve the data from the archive media at a later time, as long as the media onto which archive copies are written is not erased and as long as SAM-QFS Manager can access the recovery point file.