Document Purpose: Restoring Personal Address Books with Reload

Introduction

About a year ago I was visiting with a customer with a large installed base of Reload. The administrator enthusiastically shared that they had used Reload 20 times that week. I was surprised, although I knew people needed to restore e-mail, I couldn't imagine they needed to restore e-mail that often.

Then the administrator explained that they had implemented the GroupWise Mobile Server. Many of the requests to use Reload had to do with personal address books. In a mobile client, without a rich desktop client, with multiple prompts etc., users were accidentally deleting entire personal address books. And fortunately, with the easily accessible "Access Mode" feature of Reload, the administrator was able to assist users in restoring their address books.

My inspiration for this blog is the now famous, Wendy's Hole commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3g6NMS41rg&feature=related

You know . . . . maybe the reason backup solutions are called "backup" is that backup technologies often make you feel as though you are going back into the computing stone ages.

Below are some of the un-written, but well established laws of "backup" solutions.

Some of these laws we've had for so long that we have come to believe them and accept them. Here are just some of them:

1. You cannot get at backed up data quickly.

2. If you want to get at backed-up data quickly, you must have a complete copy of the data on disk some place.

For about half of the year, I develop Reload, and the other half of the year, I work directly with GroupWise and Reload customers. The advantage to this approach is two-fold:

I get a real-world understanding of how customers are using GroupWise and Reload

It's going to hurt saying this . . . , I find bugs and design flaws in my own software

With all the consulting I do, I'm piling up all kinds of stories and factoids from dozens of customer consultations. Here's a few:

[ Did You Know Reload is Fast! ]

I hesitate to talk about other vendor's solutions in a public forum, so I won't. But I have no problem talking about genre's of solutions.

Spy on Reload Customers

You know sometimes it's difficult to trust the vendor of a product. All too often, it seems that they may be making things look just a little shinier than they are.

Perhaps you want un-biased, from-the-heart opinions of Reload. Well I've got the perfect idea for you. You can spy on Reload customers and hear what they have to say. Here's a way you can do this:

1.Go to the Novell GroupWise Listserver (NGWList) archive server.

a.) Click on the link below:

http://marc.info/?l=ngw&w=2&r=1&s=&q=b

b.) Type in the word “reload” in the search field

Reload 2.5 Support Pack #2 (Build Version 25550) is Shipping

Article Contents:

1. How to Upgrade to The Latest Reload Support Pack

2. What's Cool
a.) Enhanced Intra-day Standard Backups
b.) Retain to Reload Integration

3. What's New
a.) New Logging Enhancements
b.) GroupWise 7.0.3 Integration
c.) Disaster Recovery Improvements

4. Tay Kratzer's Two Wishes for Reload Customers

[ How to Upgrade to The Latest Reload Support Pack ]

Method # 1: Use this method when the Reload Server can connect directly to an HTTP server on the Internet:

Probably the #1 question when people consider what they need to do

to implement a Reload server is, "How much disk space do I need?"

There are simple forumlas to use and more complex ones.

Here's the simple formula 2.5 Times the size of the post office for every week you want to keep on the Reload server.

So if you have a 100 Gigabyte post office, and you want to keep around two weeks of backups, then you generally want about 500 Gigabytes of space on the Reload server. However, there are some other things to consider, which is why I encourage you to read on.

Let me try and explain how the disk space is used first, then we'll work on formulas.

Reload is really simple to set up. A lot of customers just use the wizard, do some backups, restore some e-mail and they walk away from the Reload server feeling as though they are about two inches off the floor.

There is so much more that you can do with Reload though with a little bit more effort.

If you are a consultant, or new to Reload, here is a high-level list of things you should consider doing when implementing your Reload server:

http://www.gwavanation.com/node/335

If you do not have a consultant you are welcome to contact your GWAVA Salesperson for a quote for off-site (remote access) consulting with me (Tay Kratzer) the developer of Reload.

If you don't know about Reload 2.5, make sure to read this article:

http://www.gwavanation.com/node/478

Currently Reload 2.5 is code complete, the following work remains to be done:

1. A little bit of web interface design

2. Written and video documentation

You'll be seeing Reload 2.5 soon.

Enjoy
-Tay