Backup

[Bo Thide']

The backup tool of preference in HP-UX
is 'fbackup'. It's best run from inside
'sam' where you can set up automated
backups, make interactive backups etc.
This is the preferred method for making
backups of the OS.

Contrary to popular belief, the Ignite-UX 'make_recovery' is *NOT* a backup tool.
Rather it copies the LIF disk area (which
is not part of the OS) onto the tape together
with *SOME PARTS* of the OS and the file
tree. This makes the tape bootable so that
you can use it to boot the system and then
use the backup tape (from the 'sam' session)
to restore the entire OS and file tree.

There is no need for a 'make_recovery' tape
unless you have had a disk crash which made
the disk unbootable (i.e., physical damage).

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Hi Bo,

You are very correct. Make_recovery should not replace the normal full system backups or root file system backups. It is useful for hard disk recovery or installing OS on a new hard disk.

cheers!

[Rick Garland]

All stated thus far - TRUE!

make_recovery is a very useful tool for the beginnings of rebuilding a system. If you do not have mirror for the root VG, make_recovery is highly recommended.

Do not backup a system using make_recovery. You can start the rebuilding process with make_recovery and can make modifications to the root VG if need be. Example, changing from HFS to JFS, need a larger / filesystem, etc.

If rebuilding a system from scratch, sxtart with make_recovery to get vg00 back and then restore the other VGs using the backup tool (i.e. fbackup, dump, cpio, etc...)

[Geetam]

I make backups with fbackup. My 'plan' for a disaster recovery is to boot up from the Recovery CD and use frecover to restore everything.

Do I still need a bootable tape made with Ignite-UX?

[Jim Mulshine]

Ignite/UX is very useful! A few months ago we needed to replace the 2 x 9GB disks in vg00 with 2 x 18GB. I first created an Ignite tape with "make_recovery -A -v". Then the system was halted and the old disks were replaced by the new ones. I booted the Ignite tape and 45 minutes later the system was up and running. No problems! I didn't need to restore from my full-system OmniBack backup since the Ignite tape contained everything in vg00. Other volume groups exist but they are on external disk arrays and were not affected. Since the system was a node in a ServiceGuard cluster I just moved the packages over to the other node first and therefore had only a few minutes of downtime on the packaged application. When the Ignited system was up again I then replaced the root disks of the other node following the same procedure, using Ignite successfully again. I recommend using Ignite/UX for disk replacement as described above.