I need to backup to a non-tape drive

[Derfjay]

Our company has a tape drive that is failing and the administration does not want to continue to backup to tape.

Is there a way we can convert our existing HP-UX fbackup process to backup up to another drive, a network share, etc?

[Dennis Handly]

You can backup to remote tape drives on HP-UX.  Probably lots slower?

You can also backup to NFS files using -f.

[Bill Hassell]

The simple answer is to use another HP-UX system with a tape drive, setup remsh login as root and specify the remote system tape like this: fbackup -f systemb:/dev/rmt/2mn ... Note: the remote tape drive capability requires another HP-UX system in order to work. Also, the network may not be capable of sustaining full speed for the tape so the time to backup the system may be 3-5 times longer than a direct-attached tape drive.

However, you cannot restore the boot disk (vg00) from an fbackup tape.  It requires a running HP-UX system to read the tape). In this case, you setup another HP-UX system as an Ignite network server and backup vg00 over the network. You can then restore a dead system from the network.

If this is the only HP-UX system you have, then you are in danger of losing everything if the boot disk goes bad or the boot rea is accidently overwritten. In that case, there is no networking, no HP-UX, nothing.  Only a complete install from the DVDs will allow the system to be recovered.

A share drive may imply a PC-based disk, and this requires a lot of software to be installed/configured before it will work. An NFS share from another flavor of Unix (Linux, AIX, Solaris) is a possibiity but with the caveat that a full recovery procedure needs to be developed (and tested, depending on how important this system is).