remote backup on tape drive

[msbranch]

Hell All,

I need to take backup of my two servers which are in cluster node in mc service guard and the backup is only possible on a remote tape drive.

So, please suggest me how to take backup on remote server with all the steps and how could i restore it and verify the backup.

[Prasanth Thomas]

Hello,

Do you hav HP DP ?
what do you want to take the backup, image or particular directory?.

Regards,
Prasanth Thomas.

[Md. Farhan A Azam]

Hi msbranch,

What type of backup you are saying about.

Is this a OS backup, RMAN backup or File system backup or any other backup.

Clarify the same. Then we can try to assist you on the issue.

thnx...farhan

[OldSchool]

depending on *what* you want to backup, you might take a look at fbackup, although note the following from the 11.31 man page:


WARNINGS
The fbackup, frecover, and ftio commands are deprecated for creating new archives. In a future HP-UX release, creation of new archives with these commands will not be supported. Support will be continued for archive retrieval.

you might take a look at "pax", but I don't know if it will work w/ remote tapes. There are also tar / dd scripts that can (I believe) write on remote tape drives.

Of course, you could invest in a backup product (like DataProtector or ?) that has this functionality built-in.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Service Guard has tools that appear to permit remote tape drive access.

As a practical matter, the OS does not provide these tools.

I don't think this is really going to work.
http://docs.hp.com/en/B3936-90135/B3936-90135.pdf

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

As mentioned, fbackup is pretty well broken on 11.31 (no longer backward compatible). If you are using 11.23, 11.11, 11.00 or earlier, then fbackup supports a remote tape drive only on another HP-UX system.

HOWEVER, you cannot restore anything if the target system cannot run HP-UX (ie, reload the OS because of a boot disk failure). This requires a bootable tape or network image created by Ignite/UX. Tapes cannot be booted over the network. Also note that remote network tape solutions may be be exceedingly slow to the point that the tape drive cannot slow down enough and will constantly reposition during the backup.

Without an Ignite backup (tape or network server), recovery from a boot disk failure will require your installation CDs or DVDs, then a fairly complex process to restore the OS.

What version of HP-UX are you running?

[OldSchool]

Bill H: " then fbackup supports a remote tape drive only on another HP-UX system."

I thought it worked w/ systems supporting "rmt" remote mag tape module. If so, that has been around since BSD 4.2, and is available on variety of systems (incl linux).

Of course, I could have misinterpreted the man page. Is there something specific about HP-UXs rmt that fbackup needs?

[Bill Hassell]

OldSchool: Yep, I see the rmt man page on several (non-HP-UX) systems. We took a lot of calls in the Response Center years ago and no one seemed to be successful using non-HP-UX remote tapes. The other downside was the lack of search marks on the remote tapes which made fast file retrieval impossible. It is also a single threaded protocol so performance is a big issue with ultra high speed tape drives (LTO3 and later).