backups using OmniBack and vxdump

[Rick Garland]

Hi all:

A client is looking for multiple, simultaneous backups of a system. I posted earlier about doing vxdump simultaneously to different drives - the answer is no.

Now the client is asking about OmniBack and vxdump simultaneously - different tapes, different drives, same time. Any comments? Any ideas?

Many thanks!

[Shannon Petry · Accepted solution]

Omniback is very flexible, and by default uses concurrent connections to backup multiple systems at the same time. You can setup as many concurrent connections as your device can handle. I would recommend that you look for the OB Administrators guide to get more detailed information. There are several ways you could use multiple tape devices, and one is not better than another as no site is heterogenious.

I am not sure that running vxdump at the same time would be of much help. It may introduce huge performance problems as the OBII agent and vxdump would be both trying to read the contents of the same drive(s). This would lead to I/O contention, and a performance degrade.

Regards,
Shannon

[Emil Velez]

When you configure a Backup spec in Omniback you can configure multiple disk agents for a single mount point using different subdirectories of the mount point. Each object can be assigned to a different device.

[Dave Wherry]

If they invest the money in OmniBack, why use vxdump also?
OmniBack gives you great control of the backups. Drive sepcification. Cataloging. When you have a good tool why bring another one into the mix?

[Rick Garland]

Emil & Dave:

You guys are right, OB is a better application than vxdump for doing backups. With all the options and features one can get lost in the forest at times.

The reasoning for the multiple protocols is a client is doing some testing and they are on a schedule. As a result the client wants to make doubly sure (make that 3x sure) that he has good backups to work with. It is not enough that they are provided a tape for each protocol (OB and vxdump and fbackup) but they want 3 tapes of each protocol - total of 9 tapes! The client seems to have the belief that if a tape is bad then all data is lost. Apparently the client is unaware that I am keeping multiple tapes (OB, fbackup, & ignites) in offsite storage.I gotta cover my ass with or without the clients knowledge.

I find this a little extreme but then it sounds as if the client has been burned sometime in the past. Also, who am I to tell the client "NO" when it is the client that contributes to my paycheck (ahhh, the almighty dollar!)

Many thanks for the feedback!

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Rick

For speed why not mirror the work area and then split it away at backup time (1st backup) - backup the split to tape (2nd backup) - copy the mirror split to either another machine or vg (3rd backup).

Just an idea
Paula

[Pete Randall]

And one other thought, Rick. Omniback gives the capability to make copies of backup tapes. We run a full filesystem backup once a week on Saturday, then copy it to another tape come Monday morning. That way we can do it at our convenience, rather than impinging on the backup window, and still have a duplicate for offsite storage.


Pete

[Rick Garland]

I would like to mirror the work area - this would definitely be a speed up to the tasks I am having to do now.

It has been made clear to the client that I can provide the OB tapes and the vxdump tapes at the same point in time - mainly by doing the copy with omnimcopy and dd. For the fbackup tapes, these are different points in time as these are not so easily copied.

[Shannon Petry]

Not that this helps at your site, but I'll tell you what I do at a high availability aware site.

First, for OS I have 2 ignite servers, and for backup I have 1 OBII server.

Daily, OBII runs a full backup on Fridays with new media. On Monday, new media is loaded again. Full backups run, then incremental 1's run at lunch time and evening till Friday rolls around again. I archive libraries for 2 years.

Every week, the full backup done on Fridays becomes my off site copy. Simply for insurance purposes. All other media is kept in fireproof safes on site, but we have 4 of them.

Each library holds about 240GB, so I have a ton of data.

At the most, the customer can loose 5 days of data, but in all honesty we have had 0 data loss. OBII will hang if a backup fails for any reason. You can setup warnings and reporting to let you know whan a backup fails.

You could double the insurance if you really by setting up an additional OBII server and mechanism. 2 ignite servers and 2 backup systems using good policies should be foolproof.

Regards,
Shannon

[Rick Garland]

Hi Shannon:

Good plan. I have something similar without being a HA site. (The clients do not want to foot the bill for HA)

For the OS, the most I would lose is 24 hrs worth. For the actual data in the various oracle databases, the most I would lose is 30 min. I have multiple archive backups (q30 min) running throughout the day and evening. For these archive backups I flush the oracle redo logs as a pre-exec script, forcing new arch logs to be written out. Then the archlogs are backed up.The arch logs are backed up to different media throughout the day (5 different media) so by the end of a 24 hr period I have 5 different tapes with the same data that is being retained for 1 yr. 3 of these tapes go off-site daily so I start a batch of 5 new tapes the next day. Also going off-site is an ignite tape that is created 1/week or as needed.

Ignite tapes are created at least twice/week, sometimes more if we do maintenance on a system.

Had a real live disaster test not too long ago. System crashed about 5 minutes after a arch backup. When we did the replacement, ignited, restore from backup, we got to within 2 min of the last transaction.

BTW, no more points for this thread. I really appreciate the great feedback and I am saving all of it to see what modifications I can do to make the process better.

Again, many thanks!