disaster recovery

[chunter]

I have been put in charge of creating a disaster recovery plan for our Lookout v4.0. The only problem is, I have no experience with Lookout, but because I am the net admin, I guess it all falls in my lap. Is there a standard, suggested method for backup and recovery procedures for Lookout 4.0? Thanks for the help...

[A.S.]

Hi,
Thanks for contacting National Instruments. There isn't a standard procedure for backup and recovery of Lookout. But a few steps can easily ensure that you are properly backed up for safety reasons:
1. Backup your process file. Usually all you need is the LKS (script) file (.lks extension) since it contains all the code that can be recompiled when opened by Lookout.
2. Backup the state file if you need to. This file stores the last state of all the objects on the Control Panel of your Lookout process. This file has the extension .l4t
3. Backup/archive your database. You can use MAX to do this. You can choose to do destructive or non-destructive archiving. The former archives your database to another location and destroys the data from the original database. The latter keeps the original as-is. You can also choose to archive only certain traces or certain time intervals. Check out the link below for more information on that:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/2f24997ead7c53a686256b6e00686d64?OpenDocument

So backing up your program and your data should cover everything you need. But that is contingent on your system requirements. In your case, you may or may not have additional parameters to back up.

Hope this gives you a good idea of backing up your Lookout application. Please let us know if you have any further questions.

[chunter]

Thanks so much for the information. That really put me in the right direction. I am also looking for some restore procedures, can you direct to my to some articles, or give me a run down on suggested steps?

Thanks again

[A.S.]

There are several documents on our Developer Zone. Here is one that you may find of interest:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/2f24997ead7c53a686256b6e00686d64?OpenDocument

There are other smaller documents that you can simply do a search for to find. But the basic concepts are all in this document.

Hope this helps!