backup .. ignite-ux questions ..

[someone_4]

Hey everyone .. I have found an older D370 class with a tape drive.I installed Ignite-Ux. And did make_recovery just to see if it works. So I tried it with a 4G tape.It seems to be working. My goal is to get some kind of backup procedures going. At least monthly backups would be nice seeing as we have none right now. So I have some questions about ignite-ux.
1. Is the make_recovery good for a monthly backup or should I do something else?
2. Since this is the only server that has a tape drive can I backup over my network. If so how do i set this up?
3.What size tapes do I need per server? right now I have a 4G tapes. Do I need bigger ones?

Any other advice on this issue would be great thanks..

Richard

[harry d brown jr]

1. Do one every night!
2. Yes, get Gnu's tar, and install it on all of your servers you wish to backup, or purchase something like omniback.
3.That depends upon the amount of data being backed up per server. Remember that 4gb is really 2gb compressed.

live free or die
harry

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi Richard,

1. It depents on what you are going to install on the server. You should update the tape if you make changes to vg00. I suggest making make recovery tapes when you make such a change and use tar, cpio or fbackup for regular backups.

2.Yes it is possible to backup over the network using tar etc. just check bs. for make recovery it is possible to do make_net_recovery.

3. depents on how mutch data you are going to backup.

Hope this will help

Gideon

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Some background information first.

Ignite/UX is intended to ONLY backup your vg00 volume group, and other critical files that may reside outside of vg00, (See the man page on make_recovery for more information.) so that you have a bootable tape, or network image, that you can recover the OS from in the case of a catastrophic system crash. You could potentially backup your whole system with ignite, but it would have to be a small system and your data would have to be in vg00.

Now to try to answer your questions:

1. make_recovery (make_tape_recovery in the latest versions of Ignite) is good for a monthly backups of VG00 (the OS). If you have other volume groups, look at using fbackup (native HP-UX) or some other backup utility (Omniback for example).I personally do weekly make_tape_recovery's of all of my systems, but that is just a personal preference.

2. You can backup the VG00 from other machines to your machine with the tape drive by utilizing the make_net_recovery functionality of Ignite/UX. From the make_net_recovery image, you can create a bootable tape, if you so chhose. For more information on make_net_recovery have a look at the man page, or the file /opt/ignite/share/doc/makenetrec.txt

If you want to backup all of your other servers data, look at using fbackup as it can write to a tape drive on another machine.

3. You say you currently have 4GB tapes. I would recommend that you go to DDS3 tapes (12 GB native, 24GB with 2:1 compression). But the real question is what kind of tape drive is it that the machine has. If it is not a DDS3 tape drive, then the DDS3 tapes will not work.

I hope this helps you.

[Roger Baptiste]

1. Is the make_recovery good for a monthly backup or should I do something else?

>> It depends on the frequency of changes made on
the system. For instance,
we have ignite backups of
busy production servers, once
a week. So, the choice depends on how busy your systems are.

2. Since this is the only server that has a tape drive can I backup over my network.

>> Yes, you can backup over
the network, but you have
to use make_net_recovery
and you won't be able to
use the remote tape drive.

If so how do i set this up?

>> You would need to set
up a system with enough
disk space for storing the
recovery images and run
make_net_recovery from the
client systems which you
want to back up.

3.What size tapes do I need per server? right now I have a 4G tapes. Do I need bigger ones?

>> I am not sure whether you
can use the remote drives.
Regarding the size, it depends
on what you are including in
the archive image.

-raj

[someone_4]

Hi everyone. I think the tape drive is DDS-1. Also I have about 40 systems. I think fbackup might be the way to go. Can you do make_revcovery or fbackup though cron?

Richard

[Roger Baptiste]

Pls note that make_recovery is primarily for taking
a bootable image of VG00, which can be used in case of a
disaster to "ignite" the box.
For taking regular backups of
user data , apart from vg00,
use backup utilities like
fbackup or if the need is
vast, you can go for omniback.

-raj

[Darrell Allen]

Hey Richard,

Very little to add but some form of make_recovery should be done after any OS changes (swinstall, swremove, patches added or removed). I even do one after changing the root password (though there are ways around that).

You'll probably want to use something else for regular backups if there's much data to be saved. fbackup or something that supports incremental backups is good. Omniback (though there's a cost) is better.

Lastly, remember backing up data is the easy part. Restoring is what can be tricky, especially selective restores. That's were a more robust backup solution (like OmniBack) pays off. You'll get backups done more quickly and selective restores that take multiple passes from an ignite tape can be done in one pass and much more quickly.

Darrell

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi again Richard,

You should be able to schedule it with cron but i suggest creating a script that starts the backup and execute the script from cron. You will be able to redirect the result of the script from cronlog to e-mail if you like.

Gideon

[Roger Baptiste]

yes, you can run make_recovery from cron, like
any other job. Just remember to put the tape, if you are setting it for late night ;-)

-raj