Backing up with ignite UX

[ROSS HANSON]

Is is OK to backup your whole system with ignite UX or is Ignite UX just for bringing your system "back to life" ?

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Ross,

You do not need to back up the whole system with ignite unless you have everything under vg00.

Since all the other volume groups are located on different disks than vg00, once you restore vg00, you can import the other VGs and get the data back.

Though it can be done - *DO NOT* backup anything other than vg00. Two issues.

1. Long time to recover.
2. You will restore the data back when you made the recovery tape on the non vg00 volumegroups which is bad when you can get the current data by simply importing them.

-Sri

[Pete Randall]

Ross,

Though it can be done, using Ignite to back up your entire system is not that good an idea.

First, you lose the functionality that a good backup package provides, like incremental backups, tape indexing, etc.

Second, Ignite is really just a tar image - not very fast to restore.

I'm sure there's other reasons but Ignite is intended primarily as a portable, bootable, disaster recovery tool.

Pete

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

When you ignite vg00 is backed up and the file system under vg00 have all the system configuration files including kernel.

When system is failed due to some reason you can bring system back using this tape and rest of the data you can restore from your other if you have any.
You can also add other vg's to your ignite but this would take a very long time to recover the system from disaster.

[John Bolene]

I think the better answer would be to ask more questions..

What do you have on this server?

If there is quite a bit more stuff than just normal HPUX, such as Oracle or Java or a web server, then it would not be good to use ignite for this purpose.

If it is a DNS or terminal or print or small file server then go ahead and use ignite.

I mainly use ignite to backup servers with less than 6 Gig of stuff on them.

I also use it to clone servers.

[Michael Tully]

I would say it purely depends on the size of your system as to what type of backups should be used.
If you only have a small system, then yes stick the whole lot into an ignite tape. If it much larger, then you should use 'ignite' for the OS (/dev/vg00) and a commercial package such as omniback to take care of the rest. OB has improved out of sight in regards to the integration to database packages.

[ROSS HANSON]

Everything on this server is under vg00. I ask the question because we were trying to restore a file a week ago and could not find the file in the spot it was suppose to be in. We could not find the file at all! I was just wondering if when you use make_recovery that it backups up all directories and subdirectories.

[Michael Tully]

You can of course exlude files/directories from the archive. What options are you using to create your archive. This is what I use.

# make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00 -I -v -a /dev/rmt/0mn

[Michael Thomas_3]

If you use ignite to backup your system, I dont think you can restore indivudal files. So if you want to restore a directory or a file you will have to restore your whole system to get them back.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Ross:

You most certainly can recover a file or directory from an Ignite recovery tape. You need merely to do this:

# mt -t /dev/rmt/0mn fsf 1
# tar -xvf /dev/rmt/0m filename

Note carefully the no-rewind device used with the 'mt' command to position the tape beyound the boot code. This is key to being able to read the tape.

You can use 'tar' or substitute 'pax' with any selection criteria you want.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

With make_recovery and make_tape_recovery it depends entirely on how you run as to whether or not all of your vg00 will get backed up.

With make_recovery you have to use the '-A' option to get all of vg00. If you did not use the '-A' option you will only get the critical pieces of VG00. See the man page for make_recovery for more information on how it works.

I would recommend upgrading your version of ignite and using make_tape_recovery though.

# /opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -a /dev/rmt/?mn -I -v -x inc_entire=vg00

The above command WILL get your entire vg00 written out to tape.

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

Using ignite also we can backup the whole system.

whereas i use ignite to bring back the system to normal in case OS is corrupted.

For full backup i use fbackup