backup/restore advice

[Richard Davies]

Hi

I look after a D330 running HPUX 10.20 and hp Openmail 7.0
I am looking for some advice in terms of backup and restore. I inherited this system from a previous HPUX sys admin and at present involved a a complete restore of the Openmail system due to a system failure. The restore looks like it going to take at least 30 to complete. What I am looking for is some advice with the view of making recommendations to the owners of the machine to cut down restore time in the future. At present the backup is to a DDS3 autochanger using the following procedure.
Split mirrors
mount detached mirror
backup this mirror using fbackup
remerge mirrors.
The backup takes about 14 hrs and goes across two DDS3 tapes.
I am looking at two approaches to improve this
1. Replace the DDS3 with a faster device.
2. Use an alternative to fbackup/frecover.
Any thoughts, advice, etc would be appreciated.
Thanks

Richard

[Duncan Edmonstone]

First of all have you tuned the fbackup config file? It can be sped up - read Bill Hassells post in this thread:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xd82fc4c76f92d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Otherwise eithe SDLT or LTO will be much faster than DDS3, and will easily fit on a single tape.

HTH

Duncan

[Pete Randall]

Richard,

My method of choice is to use OmniBack (though I also had good luck with Legato Networker - just couldn't stand their lousy support) to multiple DLT drives. We do a full backup of our 80GB Informix database every night in under 2 hours and full file system backups have similar timings.


Pete

[Richard Davies]

Already using a config file for fbackup. The problem is the speed of the restore at present. We are looking at ways to improve that in the future.

Openmail sits on a single logical volume of 52 GB, and consists of somewhere over 1,000,000 individual files, many of them quite small. As we would never be interested in restoring individual files, only the whole logical volume would something like vxdump be quicker for both backup and restore.

[Michael Steele_2]

Parallel data streams aka multiple data streams works together with multiplexing to allow several backups processes onto one tape device. This is a performance enhancer offered by Netbackup for example. Netbackup uses GNU tar and is easy to work with.

Are your two DDS3 tape devices on dedicated SCSI controllers? Or are they sharing one? Since bigger I/O is a bigger performance enhancer put them on dedicated SCSI controllers for a bigger pair of pipes.

Full backups are faster to restore but incremental are fastest to backup.

If a tape device is slow, then it???s slow. Aside from use compression, which is usually more efficient but not faster or updating the DDS3 firmware get something bigger like a DLT.

Raw transfers are faster because the bypass the file system structure. You can play around with dd but..., something else like Flash backup might be better. I think you have too much data for dd.

Don't forget to defragment your file system. If you disk head is flying all over the place instead of in one continuous motion then you have only your self to blame. Look into Online JFS and the fsadm command for this.

[Steven E. Protter]

If you can get a better tape drive, go for it. If not you can stick with fbackup but you don't need to back up everything. Do a partial backup of important data.

Add a weekly Ignite make_tape_recovery (make_reocvery if Ignite is really old) of only vg00.

This will allow you to do a two step backup and two step restore.

Go out, download and install the latest Ignite while you're at it.

You might even with this strategy not even need to buy another tape drive.

The above recommendations are made based on the fact the server is still running 10.20 and funds might not be available to just upgrade and replace the whole system.

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=IGNITEUX

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Better Ignite version. Ooops.

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=IGNITEUXB

sEP