BACKUP/IMAGE

[Thomas Ritter]

John, are you saying that the shadow another disk and dismount approach is flawed ? If so, how ?

[Allan Bowman]

Ron,

Getting back to your original question, the responses from Steven and Karl seem to answer your question - the additional discussions about whether or not you end up with a valid backup have previously been beaten to death in other threads (I personally have never had an issue with an on-line image backup in over 15 years of doing them). One suggestion I would make is to not put the saveset in your [backup] directory - I always put it in [000000]. With older versions of Standalone backup, you could only reliably restore from the top level directory - I'm not sure of the status of the current version. Yes, you are creating the backup on-line and can put it anywhere (I have even done it across the network), but if you ever need to restore, you will probably be using Standalone.

Allan in Atlanta

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] you could only reliably restore
> from the top level directory [...]

Really? You could (and can) only _install_
VMS (VAX) from save sets in the [000000]
directory, but I don't recall any problems
with any BACKUP operations from anywhere
else. (That's not a non-existence proof,
of course, and most of my restoration
experience involved tapes, which are pretty
much directory-free.)

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

In my opinion, a restore of a backup/ign=int results in about the same situation as when you have a crash (except that the risk for inconsistency between 2 files is greater due to the time of the backup). Even if you use convert as John said, you may find differences if you have bad luck.

And I never had any problems after a crash (but had statistically speaking not enough crashes).

So, not 100% save but save enough.

Wim

[IFX_1]

Thanks.
I'll consider what is appropriate and best enough to do recovery.