fbackup / frecover

[Avinash20]

Hi Gurus,
"HAPPY NEW YEAR"
Am novice in fbackup / frecover.
Am not able to understand the man page.
Please find my queries,
Need to know how to backup a directory, how to list the files in the backup, and an interactive backup and recovery.
Also the logs are not getting created in /var/adm/fbackupfiles/dates. I have created the directory but it doesnt seem to work.
Please suggest.

Will be rewarded as usual..

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas.]

Avinash,

This old thread should be able to answer all your questions:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=982670&admit=-682735245+1167653660746+28353475

Regards,

Jaime.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

When a backup is created a file is created.

/var/tmp/index

That lists all files in the backup. It is also created when frecover lists the files on a tape.

SEP

[Raj D.]

Avinash ,

fbackup and frecover are the preferred backup and restore programs on HP-UX. Backups produced with fbackup are not portable to other UNIX variants. If you're working in a heterogeneous environment, you won't be able to take fbackup tapes produced on an HP-UX system and recover them to a system running a different UNIX variant.

fbackup and frecover can be use at the command line , Although fbackup and frecover are the most advanced programs bundled with your HP-UX system for backup and restore, your needs may go beyond these programs. There are also advanced backup programs you can procure from both HP and third parties. In general, I find that the capabilities of fbackup and frecover are sufficient for new HP-UX installations. If, however, you have a highly distributed environment or need to back up large amounts of data, perform backups on systems with a variety of operating systems, or need to use several backup devices simultaneously, you may want to consider a more advanced product.

fbackup has the capability of performing backups at different levels. The levels define the amount of information to be included in the backup. A full backup, which is covered in this section, is backup level 0. The other levels define various degrees of incremental backups. I am a strong advocate of performing a full backup, and then performing incremental backups of every file that has changed since the last full backup. This means that to recover from a completely "hosed" (a technical term meaning destroyed) system, you would need your full backup tape and only one incremental tape (you would restore your root volume with a bootable Ignite-UX tape produced with make_tape_recovery, which is covered in Chapter 9). If, for instance, you performed a full backup on Sunday and an incremental backups on Monday through Friday, you would need to load only Sunday's full backup tape and Friday's incremental backup tape to completely restore your system. fbackup supports this scheme.

Here is an explanation of the fbackup command and some of its options:

/usr/sbin/fbackup -f device [-0-9] [-u] [-i path] [-e path] [-g graph]

-f device
The tape drive for the backup, such as /dev/rmt/0m for your local tape drive.

[-0-9]
This is the level of the backup. If you run a full backup on Sunday at level 0, then you would run an incremental backup at level 1 the other days of the week. An incremental backup will back up all information changed since a backup was made at a lower level. You could back up at 0 on Sunday, 1 on Monday, 2 on Tuesday, and so on. However, to recover your system, you would need to load Sunday's tape, then Monday's tape, then Tuesday's tape, and so on, to fully recover.

[-u]
This updates the database of past backups so that it contains such information as the backup level, time of the beginning and end of the backup session, and the graph file (described below) used for the backup session. This is valid only with the -g (graph) option.

[-i path]
The specified path is to be included in the backup. This can be issued any number of times.

[-e path]
The specified path is to be excluded from the backup. This can also be specified any number of times.

[-g graph]
The graph file contains the list of files and directories to be included or excluded from the backup.



Although fbackup is quite thorough and easy to use, it does not have embedded in it the day and time at which full and incremental backups will be run. You have to make a cron entry to run fbackup automatically.

In its simplest form, we could run fbackup and specify only the tape drive with the f option and the directory to back up with the i option as shown in the following example:

# fbackup -f /dev/rmt/0m -i /var/tmp
fbackup(1004): session begins on Wed Jul 12 14:26:30 2000
fbackup(3205): WARNING: unable to read a volume header
fbackup(3024): writing volume 1 to the output file /dev/rmt/0m
fbackup(3055): total file blocks read for backup: 3606
fbackup(3056): total blocks written to output file /dev/rmt/0m: 3857
fbackup(1030): warnings encountered during backup
#

fbackup did not produce a list of files included in the backup since we did not include the v option for verbose.

To view the contents of the tape, we run frecover with the options r for read, N to prevent the contents of the tape from being restored to the system, and v for verbose, as shown in the following command:

# frecover -rNv -f /dev/rmt/0m
drwxr-xr-x root root /
dr-xr-xr-x bin bin /var
drwxrwxrwx bin bin /var/tmp
-rw------- root sys /var/tmp/OBAMFEAa01630
-rw------- root sys /var/tmp/OBAMHBAa01020
-rw------- root sys /var/tmp/OBAMHBAa01540


Hope this will help,
Cheers,
Raj.

[Raj D. · Accepted solution]

Avinash,

Also check out this threads , :


http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=997509&admit=-682735245+1167697344754+28353475

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=23299&admit=-682735245+1167697397004+28353475

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=111261&admit=-682735245+1167697426844+28353475


hth,
Raj.

[Avinash20]

Hi Folks,

Let me check with the information provided by all.
If any more information, please add it.,

[Avinash20]

thanks everyone