fbackup OR tar

[Shahbaz_1]

Hi,
I am looking at backup tool options on HP Unix 11.0. Whether to use fbackup/frecover or tar. Which one is more effecient (time saving),reliable and easy to use. Is frecover is as easy as tar xvf ---.
Thanks & Regards
Syed

[Hartmut Lang]

fbackup is fast and flexible. It needs some time to read the manual pages, but i think it is worth to understand its options.
If you need something protable for different platforms, stick to tar. fbackup is HPUX-only!

Hardy

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

fbackup supports backing up large files that are greater 2 GB while the tar binary (not the GNU tar) that comes with HP-UX supports file sizes only up to 2 GB.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Peter Kloetgen · Accepted solution]

Hi,

you should allways take the fbackup- command instead of tar for several reasons:
- tar is very slow when doing a backup
- tar is not able to backup large files (bigger than 2GB)
- tar can't handle UIDs bigger than 65536

fbackup doesn't have these problems, it is much faster than tar and can handle large files and UIDs bigger than 65536.

there is an alternative for these two commands:

pax- command, which will be the industrial standard- command on all UNIXes in the future.

pax can read all tar- and cpio- formats and is available on all UNIXes and is planned for Linux at the moment. If you run fbackup- commands pax is doing the job.

So: your choice should be fbackup or pax!
these commands are as simple as tar... see:
man pax/fbackup


Allways stay on the bright side of life!


Peter

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

tar is slow compared to fbackup/frecover.
however fbackup/frecover works only on HP-UX.
if you wanted backed file to be portable to other OS then i suggest to go for tar.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Some caveats to note about fbackup:

1) fbackup cannot be used with non-rewinding devices such as /dev/rmt/0mn but tar can be used with non-rewinding devices.

2) [extract from man page] fbackup does not back up network special files because RFA networking is obsolete. A warning message is issued if a network special file is encountered in the backup graph and the file is skipped.

3) [extract from man page] The use of fbackup for backing up NFS mounted file systems is not guaranteed to work as expected if the backup is done as a privileged user. This is due to the manner in which NFS handles privileged-user access by mapping user root and uid 0 to user nobody, usually uid -2, thus disallowing root privileges on the remote system to a root user on the local system.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Shahbaz_1]

Thanks everybody,
I got my answer. So I should explore more on fbackup/frecover.
Regards
Syed