You may lose data as a result of an unplanned outage, such as a disk failure. The most extreme example of data loss is losing your entire site, such as what might happen as a result of a natural disaster.
There are a few ways that you can prevent your data from being lost in these situations or at least limit the amount of data that is lost.
Backup and recovery
It is imperative that you have a proven strategy for backing up your server; the time and money you spend creating this strategy is more than recovered should you need to restore lost data or perform a recovery. Once you have created a strategy, you must ensure that it works by testing it, which involves performing a backup and recovery and then validating that your data was backed up and restored correctly. If you change anything on your server, you need to assess whether your backup and recovery strategy needs to change.
Every system and business environment is different, but, ideally, you should try to do a full backup of your system at least once a week. If you have a very dynamic environment, you will also have to back up changes to objects on your system since the last backup. Then, if you have an unexpected outage and need to recover those objects, you can recover the latest version of them.
For guidance on how to create a backup and recovery strategy, see Plan a backup and recovery strategy. For instructions on how to perform backups on your server, see Back up your server. For information on how to restore your server, see Recover your server.
If you would like a solution to help you manage your backup and recovery strategy and your backup media, you can use Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS). BRMS is a program that helps you implement a disciplined approach to managing your backups, and provides you with an orderly way to retrieve lost or damaged data. Using BRMS, you can manage your most critical and complex backups, including online backups of Lotus® servers, simply and easily. You can also recover your system fully in the event of a disaster or failure.
In addition to these backup and recovery features, BRMS enables you to track all of your backup media from creation to expiration. You no longer have to keep track of which backup items are on which volumes, and worry that you will accidentally write over active data. You can also track the movement of your media to and from offsite locations.
For detailed information on the tasks that BRMS can help you perform, see Backup, Recovery and Media Services.
For help in planning and managing
your backup and recovery strategy, contact IBM® Business Continuity and Recovery Services 
.
Limit the amount of data that is lost
You can group your disk drives into logical subsets called disk pools (also known as auxiliary storage pools or ASPs). The data in one disk pool is isolated from the data in the other disk pools. If a disk unit fails, you only have to recover the data that was stored in the disk pool that the failed disk unit was a part of.
For detailed information on disk pools, disk pool types, and examples of how to use disk pools for different purposes, see Disk pools. For information on how to configure disk units and disk pools, see Disk management.
Independent disk pools are disk pools that can be brought online or taken offline without any dependencies on the rest of the storage on a system. This is possible because all of the necessary system information associated with the independent disk pool is contained within the independent disk pool. Independent disk pools offer a number of availability and performance advantages in both single and multiple system environments. For detailed information, see Independent disk pools.
Logical partitions provide the
ability to divide one system into several independent systems. The use of
logical partitions is another way that you can isolate data, applications,
and other resources. You can use logical partitions to improve the performance
of your server, such as by running batch and interactive processes on different
partitions. You can also protect your data by installing a critical application
on a partition apart from other applications. Then, if another partition fails,
that program is protected.
For detailed information on logical partitions and how to use them, see Logical partitions.