topic Re: fbackup - incremental backup is backing up entire directory structure in Operating System - HP-UX

fbackup - incremental backup is backing up entire directory structure

Cynthia Sterle — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:20:16 GMT

I am using fbackup to take a full system backup once a week to tape. In between the weekly backups, I would like to take daily incremental backups and store these to disk.

The problem is the incremental backup is backing up the entire directory structure of the fileserver, even through there are no modified files in the directories. So I have every directory on the server in the incremental backup but most directories are empty as there are no modified files in them.

Shouldn't the incremental backup just be creating the directory structure of the files that have been modified?

It makes it hard to see what files have changed. Also, the size of the daily backup is huge, which prevent storing the daily backups on disk.

To verify this, I took a level 0 full backup, which was 91 GB. Then right after it completed, I took a level 1 backup, which was 18 GB. From comparing the two backup index files, the daily backup index file was almost entirely composed of folder structures.

Is there a way to prevent fbackup from writing the entire directory structure when there are no file modifications within the directory?
Thanks,
Cindy

Re: fbackup - incremental backup is backing up entire directory structure

Glenn S. Davidson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:36:22 GMT

Here is what I used to use on my workstation. I hope it helps.

#####################################################################
#
# Setup for Daily incrementals
#
#####################################################################
Monday|Tuesday|Wednesday|Thursday|Friday )

case "$today"
in
Monday )
level=1 ;;
Tuesday )
level=2 ;;
Wednesday )
level=3 ;;
Thursday )
level=4 ;;
Friday )
level=5 ;;
esac

# Perform the daily incrementals
echo "Beginning Daily backup on "$hn" ...from Backup script." > $today
echo `date +%c` >> $today
echo " " >> $today

/usr/sbin/fbackup -$level -u -v -g /my_backups/system.daily -I /my_backups/backup.logs/backup_log.incr -c /my_backups/backup.logs/backup.conf -d /my_backups/backup.logs/backup.dates -f /dev/rmt/c0t3d0BEST 2>&1

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo "Daily Backup Completed" >> $today
else
echo "Daily Backup Failed" >> $today
fi

echo " " >> $today
echo "Ending Daily backup on "$hn" ...from Backup script." >> $today
echo `date +%c` >> $today
echo " " >> $today
cp /my_backups/backup.logs/backup_log.incr /my_backups/backup.logs/incrementals/backup.$day
elm -s "Daily backup results" root@$hn < $today

# Eject todays tape
mt -t /dev/rmt/c0t3d0BEST offl

;;

Re: fbackup - incremental backup is backing up entire directory structure

Cynthia Sterle — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:46:10 GMT

Glenn,
Thank you for your response. I will try out this script.
Thanks again,
Cindy