BACKUP

[augusto cossa]

Hi,

I'm using HP-UX 10.20 and at moment I do not have any tools outside SAM to do backup to mine O.S. What do you suggest me to do in order to perform backup to be used in case of system crash?

I have already done the Ignite Backup, so what kind of backup should be done to the O.S.?

Thanks,
A Cossa

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

you said that you have done a ignite backup.
If you have done it with make_recovery -A on a DDS tape drive then you have the best thing for disaster recovery.
The tape that you created whith make_recovery is a bootable tape with all date from volume group 0 (vg00).

Regards

Andrew

[Rick Garland]

The make_recovery -A is probably the best thing to have if you are not mirroring the root drive/volume group.

As for the rest of the system, there are many packages and utilities available to use.
Examples:
Veritas, Legato are a couple of packages.
Utilities would be dump, vxdump, cpio, pax, tar, etc.

My choice would the the amount of data to be backed up, the ease at learning for all members of the backup crew, time availability to do the backups, ease and speed to do restores, etc...

[Jennifer Chiarelli]

With HP-UX 10.20 you also have tar and cpio as choices for backups. The ignite backup takes care of your OS backup, as long as the backup was good( tape drive was clean and the tape media was good)! For disaster recovery purposes you should have at least 2 copies of your Ignite backup. And one of those should be stored off site! If you put 2 copies off site, then have another on site. The point is that if either site has a disaster, the other site still has a good tape. When ever you add hardware, drivers or update your OS configuration, you must also re-create you Ignite tapes so that you can re-create your current system. That will cover you for the OS.

For the rest of your system, fbackup works well as long as you don't ever need to restore to a non HP-UX system (tar works well for this). Also, many data base systems have special requirements for doing backups and fbackup is often not suitable for this.