frecover help needed

[Timur Chirikov]

Hello,
We do our system backups using SAM automated backups (fbackup). On the single tape we have a full backup followed by 2 incremental backups. Is it possible to recover each of those backups? How would we do it?

I was able to use frecover command to get a list of files on the tape:
/etc/frecover -I /tmp/tape_index -v -f /dev/rmt/2mn

However, this gives me only the list of files from the last incremental backup. I need to recover files from full backup and then the first incremental backup.

Thank you.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Timur:

> On the single tape we have a full backup followed by 2 incremental backups.

That's impossible. 'fbackup' rewinds a tape and writes from the beginning. There is no way to "stack" successive backups on a tape. If you have been using the *same* tape for your full and incremental backups, then what you see is everything that you have.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

>>On the single tape we have a full backup followed by 2 incremental backups.


You may think you do, but actually you don't. fbackup ALWAYS rewinds the tape to the beginning of the tape, no matter what device you use (rewind or no-rewind).

So, at this point you do NOT have a full backup. You only have the last incremental.

You need to go back and rethink your backup and tape use strategy.

[Peter Godron]

Timur,
you only have the last incremental, as you will have overwritten the earlier fbackup data. See "man fbackup".
Did you not test you backup strategy, when you set it up.
You could use fbackup to write to file on disk, but I would suggest tar or cpio for tape.

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[Timur Chirikov]

Thank you all for your help.

Previous sys admins configured the backups on the server many years ago. I was/am new to HP-UX but have Linux administration experience.

I will reconfigure our backups so we don't have this problem again.

[Timur Chirikov]

closing thread