ftio

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

I tried out the command ftio (see man ftio). It was really astonishing. I copied file systems to DDS2 tapes in short a very short time without using single user mode. Also I wonder how ftio did manage to copy some files while they are still open. Below I gave some results of four of our servers when used I used ftio:

K220: 2 hours 58 min
Using ftio ???oxv ???remote Tape DDS2 Drive??? /

B2000: 10 hours
Using ftio ???oxv ???remote DDS2 Tape Drive??? /

K250: about 30 min
Using ftio -oxv /dev/rmt/c2t0d0BEST /usr /var /etc /home /stand /sbin

K570: 1 hour 12 min
Using ftio -oxv /dev/rmt/c4t0d0BEST /usr /var /etc /home /stand /sbin

My question is why isn???t ftio mentioned with the backup commands (cpio, tar, fbackup, dd, dump, vxdeump)....

Is it recommended to use ftio in addition to fbackup for UNIX backup tasks?? How about recovery?

[T G Manikandan · Accepted solution]

Infact,ftio has greater backup speed compared to tar,cpio.

you can also use it for full and incremental backups.
It can also span multiple tapes.
The only disadvantage is that like cpio,tar it cannot support files greater than 2GB.

Another important thing is that ftio can is compatible with cpio backups.
Using ftio you can recovery backups that were taken usinc cpio.



REvert

[T G Manikandan]

ftio obsoleted

http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&admit=-682735245+1040477038854+28353475&docId=200000062959129

[Bill Hassell]

As mentioned, ftio is obsolete. It was designed more than a decade ago to support 1/4" tape cartridges and 1/2" reel-to-reel tapes. It should not be used in a production environment.

The fastest backup (and restore) built into HP-UX is fbackup, but you must run with a config file to maximize performance for DDS and DLT tapes. Create a file with:

blocksperrecord 256
records 32
checkpointfreq 1024
readerprocesses 6
maxretries 5
retrylimit 5000000
maxvoluses 200
filesperfsm 2000

and run fbackup using the -c option. frecover can restore individual files 10-100x faster than cpio, tar, dump or ftio.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Another disadvantage with ftio is that it is HP-UX only. A cpio or tar tape is portable to other Unix systems but not a ftio tape.

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Thanks guys,


Too bad...

ftio obsoleted ?? why it looks fast.

If I have only HP-UX servers why bother ???

I will test ftio vs fbackup on production server in a few days. I hope I'll post the results soon.... ftio could win .... ???? Maybe not..