Full Restore using vxdump?

[Jeanine Kone]

I am being told by our sysadmin that it is nearly impossible to doa ful restore with a backup made by vxdump. IS this true?

For a bit of history: We do a level zero vxdump on every filesystem except stand (b/c you can't) twice per week as our full system backups. We tried a disaster recovery test this week, and the sysadmin was unable to restore the system using the backups we had made. He worked with an hp tech with no luck. Yes, we will be starting to use Ignite now...

Thanks.

[harry d brown jr]

How could it work? If you are restoring the OPERATING SYSTEM then you DON'T have an OPERATING SYSTEM, that's why we have IGNITE.

live free or die
harry

[Jeanine Kone]

Seems like a good point. I come from an Alpha / Digital Unix background where you could boot off the install cd, and then shell out to a command prompt to restore your O/S.

[Darrell Allen]

It's not worth the trouble (although you could probably make it work if you had to).

Ignite. Then you could use vxdump, fbackup, or (even better) Omniback or other full fledged backup software for other filesystems.

Darrell

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This is not true. It's perfectly feasible to restore the system from a set of vxdumps although you also need a 'dump' of stand as well. I've done it many times (and still don't use Ignite).

The trick is to install a basic HP-UX from the installation CD (or an ignite tape) then build a new boot disk and recover the logical volumes from your dump/vxdumps.

Don't forget that Ignite has been around for a lot less time than HP-UX!

Regards,
John

[Darrell Allen]

Okay, I'll admit that John is right: you can restore a system from vxdumps.

I'll still go with Ignite. In my opinion, it's much easier, quicker, and straight-forward.

John, have you had a bad experience with Ignite? It's not so new that it isn't tried and tested. Besides, isn't it good that new things and better ways of doing things are constantly being developed?

Darrell

[John Palmer]

Hi Darrell,

No, I've not had a bad experience with Ignite, I've never had to use it.

Currently, all the HP backups that we do include all the root volumes and I know that I could restore the whole server. Running Ignite would require another backup job and the associated tape and I'd have to consider how often I ran it - daily like the other backups? or maybe weekly in which case I'd have to think about recovering things that may have changed since the Ignite tape was written.

So, basically it doesn't really add any value to our already tried and tested disaster recovery procedure.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
John