Preparing to recover from problems

``Summary of system administration tasks'' describes a number of practices that can help you avoid system problems and minimize the impact of system failures that happen. A few of these points are summarized here:

• Make emergency recovery media as described in ``Creating and using emergency recovery media''. In case of a complete system failure, you can follow the procedures to restore your system. Otherwise, you may need to reinstall the software before you will be able to boot the system.

• Monitor system performance, error logs, and the system log book regularly. This can enable you to correct problems before they cause a hard failure. See ``Using the System Monitor'' and ``Using the System Logs Manager'' for more information.

• Install an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on the system to protect the system from damage during power surges and failures.

• Back up the system regularly. Consider running full system backups every week or two. Because incremental backups are usually faster than full backups, it is tempting to run full backups only rarely. However, if you need to restore files, you may need to restore the most recent full backup plus all incrementals run since then, which could be a long and tedious process.