The fastest way for a total vg backup

[uxbeginner22]

I have 3 vg on my hpux server,one is vg00,other two are

vg01 and vg02.

For backup of vg00 i use make_tape_recovery and i'm totally satisfied.

What you suggest for a total backup of vg01 and vg02?

vgcfgbackup+cpio?

or other?

Thanks

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The fastest (builtin) backup tool is fbackup. Everything else is a single stream and will have a very hard time keeping up with modern tape drives like LTO.  The problem is that the tape drives require far more data than a single disk can provide. For example, an LTO5 requires more than 150 MBytes/second to keep it busy, and up to twice as much (300 MB/sec) if the data is highly compressible. Otherwise, like all streaming tape drives, it will run out of data to write and must slowdown, then stop, then reverse direction to reposition and get ready to start writing, which drastically reduces throughput (longer backups) but also wears out the mechanisms. Note that LTO drives do have a data rate matching feature that will allow the drive to slowdown to less than half speed but still keep moving. This alleviates the wear problem but of course slows down the backup rate.

Always use a config file for fbackup - the defaults without the config will be very poor. Here's a good config:

blocksperrecord 4096
records 64
checkpointfreq 8192
readerprocesses 6
maxretries 5
retrylimit 5000000
maxvoluses 200
filesperfsm 5000

The readerprocesses value allows multiple files to be read at the same time, thus keeping a steady stream of data flowing to the drive. The command line would look something like this:

fbackup -f /dev/rmt/some_tape -c /etc/fbackup.config -g /some/graph_file 

where:

-f is the magtape device

-c is the config file location

-g is a graph file with include and exclude lines, like this:

i /ora1
i /ora2
e /ora2/junk
i /bigvolume/bigdata1

By using a graph file, you can easily choose multiple mountpoints and exclude specific directories.

Although fbackup is tagged to be obsoleted for future releases, 11.31 is currently the only release for HP-UX after Dec 2015, with all future releases = 11.31 plus an update number. None of the alternatives can approach the speed of fbackup and for multi-tape backups, it is the only tool that will tell you which tape to insert to restore a particular file. Each tape has a complete table of contents at the front which can be read in a few seconds with frecover. None of the other backup tools can provide a contents list without reading the entire tape.

Unfortunately, some changes were made to the 11.31 version that make the resultant tapes incompatible with previous versions of HP-UX. Not too worry though. Attached is a document describing a workaround.

[chindi]

Hi ,

You want to take backup on tape or disk ?

If you have backup software like DP there is something called as Disk Image which is very fast if you have 8GB SAN BE and your Host too has the same.

In our case 500GB can be backed up in 1 hr on tape.

Note: If you want to restore it , you have to create same size of luns or greater than existing ones.