fbackup

[Robie Lutsey]

Hey Guys I have a quick question.

I recently bought a HP 6x40 autoloader and a) Fbackup doesn't work with that device and b) the tapes don't change automatically and c) the software doesn't come with a version for HP-UX 11.0.

Any advice on where to start with this problem? Thanks!!

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Unless you want to write a ton of scripts, I suggest you look at OmniBack.

[harry d brown jr]

You could buy omniback or something like that. But are you sure fbackup doesn't work?


live free or die
harry

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Well, fbackup could probably write to the tapes if they are in the drives already, but fbackup won't mount them for you.

Most folks, when buying a autoloader like that, also invest in 3rd party backup software that knows how to handle jukeboxes. HP-UX doesn't know that by itself.

Some of the more popular products:

HP OmniBack
Legato Networker
Veritas Netbackup

I would advise looking at one of these. The beauty of most of these is that you will see better throughput because they can utilize multiple tape drives at once to get your data written to tape faster. fbackup can only handle one tape drive at a time, unless you split your fbackups into completely separate jobs.

[Robie Lutsey]

Yes I am sure fbackup isn't working. We just this weekend upgraded to HP-UX 11 and the tapes written on 10.20 don't seem to be working.

I am just going to take all your advice and get omniback.

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

The others have basically given you the
information on alternative backup software
and I completely agree. On one system we
use a small script to load and remove tapes
at varying times of the day using 'mc'
I've attached it here for your convenience.
Only problem I can see is that if that tape
fills up your toast.

If you haven't done so, you will still need
to setup the robotics as well. See the link below
on how.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x55e2f715edc6d5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

-Michael

[Robie Lutsey]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Unfortunatly the tape does fill up and I need something to change it when it is full. Any other suggestions?

[Steven Burgess]

Just as an idea, once you have the tape loaded fbackup commands do work

we use the following to check status and load tapes

mc -p /dev/rmt/0pick -r DS - to see the status of the Autoloader drive & slots - will display either FULL or EMPTY

mc -p /dev/rmt/0pick -s S3 -d D1 - this will move a tape from slot 3 to the drive. To perform the reverse, use the following:

mc -p /dev/rmt/0pick -s D1 -d S3

We have entered this code into our backup scripts to check tapes loaded, load tapes, clean drives etc

[Bill Hassell]

fbackup/frecover will talk to the tape drive just fine. When you say that frecover failed to read 10.20 tapes, what was the error message.

However, fbackup has no code to handle autoloaders which are special devices. There is no magtape command to control the robot. That's the job of the mc command (you may need a patch for really old versions of HP-UX).

The designers of fbackup recognized that special handling is necessary when the end-of-tape is encountered and that's the job of the chgvol script (man fbackup). This script will be run each time the EOT is seen. You specify the chgvol script in the config file for fbackup (NEVER run fbackup without a config file--the defaults are not correct for DDS and DLT drives).

If you need script that loads a specific tape into the drive, get a copy of loadmedia (and also autosum). These demonstrate the use of the mc command. Get a copy from:

ftp://contrib:9unsupp8@hprc.external.hp.com/sysadmin/coolscripts/

[Robie Lutsey]

Posted by Bill Hassel:
(NEVER run fbackup without a config file--the defaults are not correct for DDS and DLT drives).

This might be the problem. Where can I find information on configuring fbackup?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Clifford:

The 'fbackup' configuration parameters are enumerated in the man pages for 'fbackup'. A default set is used if the 'config' file is absent, and are non-optimal.

I don't have any magic values for you to use. I like blocksperrecord=64 or 128 with a checkpointfreq=128 or 256 accordingly. The 'blocksperrecord' parameter has generally been shown to have the biggest impact with the 'checkpointfreq' also being important. I'd rather gain speed during backup and sacrifice it during recovery, so I don't worry too much about the parameters like 'filesperfsm'. Three to five retries for busy files is more than enough.

An excellent document is #B00000196 "Understanding Fbackup/Frecover and Optimizing Backup Performance". I've attached it for your convenience.

Regards!

...JRF...