Bruce and Stan bring up good points which I want to address.  Bruce did indeed contact me after his disaster and I tried, in vain, to help him get is registry back.  Before someone asks, Bruce was not using Hiback/NT.  Hiback/NT does backup the registry, and lets you restore it.  The NT registry is, how shall I put this, arcane, to say the least.  It is made up of hives which are stored in 4 different files.  Information about the machine is perhaps not something you want to restore following a disaster as this may not accurately reflect the current machine.  What you need to restore are the security and the application stuff.  This you can do either with Hiback or through other methods.

One of the things which I find most people do not do is to have a current version of the recovery disk for their NT.  I do this religiously and keep this disk with the bootable floppies.  This disk, in conjunction with the original floppies and the CD will let you recover from a disaster situation.  Further, Hicomp is working towards a unified recovery technique, whereby you can bypass all that stuff and recover quickly from a lost disc.  There are many challenges, chief among them; multiple file systems, FAT, NTFS and HPFS, the latter no longer supported on 4.0; various devices such as DDS, DLT, MO and others; the size of the floppy disc (1.44MB); whether there is a bootable CD-ROM on the system; and whether we are talking about NT Workstation (less registry stuff) or NT Server (lots more registry stuff).

Some of the shops in serious NT production make use of SCSI arrays and hot-pluggable disk drives to cure the lost disc syndrome.  This is an inexpensive and solid solution.  The current crop of NT servers has this SCSI array built-in for a few thousand dollars. HP, Compaq and others supply NT applets to manage their arrays, they work beautifully.  Very inexpensive insurance and it also offers somewhat faster performance for retrievals as it can go after multiple drives.  There is no impact on write performance at it is done in hardware.  NT also has RAID 0, 1 and 5 built-in and thus does support the same stuff as the arrays, but there is a performance penalty.  So with RAID, if a disk goes bad, yank it, slap in another one and continue on, without any interruption.  If you use NT for a server, consider getting these arrays, or upgrading to these arrays.

As an aside, if you run a shop with NT Server without one of these arrays, you have no grounds to compare NT's reliability with MPE's reliability.  MPE runs only on the HP 3000 and the 3000 has a very limited (in comparison) offering of devices available to it.  This limitation is key to the HP 3000's and by extension, MPE's reliability.  NT on the other hand, not only runs on 4 (now 2) platforms, but it also runs on a staggering number of Intel architecture-based machines.  I have seen NT run on everything from notebooks (like mine, I now dual boot NT Server and Windows 95), desktops of all kinds and industrial strength servers such as HP's excellent NetServers.  If you give NT good hardware and good software, it runs fine, lasts a long time.  If you skimp of the hardware, you will skimp on the reliability.  If you put on bad software, it can take NT down, just as bad software can adversely affect MPE.   I crack up when I hear people piss and moan about NT crashing all the time when they get the cheapest, (read unreliable) hardware in order to save $20 or $100, yet think nothing of shelling out many $1,000s for disc drives for their HP 3000s.  End of aside.

Hiback/NT also allows one to backup a raw partition to a storage device.  So, if you have multiple servers, you could always backup the C: partition to a tape using a raw backup, and storing all the other partitions using a filesys backup.  In the event of a disaster, you can restore the raw partition to a new disc drive using another NT machine for the restore to a new disk.  Once this is done, you replace the crashed disk in your original server, reboot and there you go.

The HP 3000, along with all the other things it does so well, is able to bootstrap itself far enough to start reading from a tape drive and restore itself.  However, once you have restored MPE far enough to run, you will usually do the disaster recovery on-line with your favorite tool.  It has been almost 2 decades since I last did a coldload/reload of the entire system.  If you had a problem during the restore, all the work would be lost.  With the volume sets, you protect yourself from having to reload everything due to a hardware event, and on NT you can do the same.  It is creating a simple solution to getting NT up far enough to do the restore which is a challenge at the moment.

One final note, even if you backup the system and the registry and the ACL, it is also a good idea to create what I call a magic diskette to store with your repair diskettes and your initial floppies.  This diskette allows me to boot up any PC, anywhere and has the drivers for the CD-ROMs, ATAPI or SCSI.  I have found this diskette to be worth it weight in platinum many times over. It is good for DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT.  If you are interested in the contents of the diskette, drop me an e-mail.

Start of Plug:

If you want more information on Hiback/NT, Hiback/UX  and how you can backup your network to the HP 3000, please visit the Hicomp site listed below, and find out why HP, after testing all solutions, uses Hiback/UX and Hiback/NT in their biggest production environment.

End of plug.

Kind regards,

Denys. . . 

Denys Beauchemin
Hicomp America, Inc.
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(800) 323-8863   (281) 288-7438  fax: (281) 355-6879