HP-UX fbackup vs IBM backup

[Steve Hémond]

Hi everybody,

People here used to work on a HP/9000 box since 1993 and now we have to move to a IBM RS/6000. Many backups have been taken from the HP box (using FBACKUP command) and I have to 'convert' them to IBM backups on another media type. I tried to read a HP backup tape on the IBM box but it didn't see anything (probably because this is a unrecognized backup format).

What would be the best way to convert the HP backups to IBM? Any ideas?

It wouldn't be very funny to restore each backup on a temporary file system on the HP box, rcp the files to the IBM box and backup the files from there on the new media, that would be non-sense ... ;-)

Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[Darren Prior]

Hi Steve,

fbackup isn't a portable format I'm afraid. Unless you can figure out a way to write a program to read the tape contents and dump it in the format of your choice I think you're going to be limited to frecover'ing onto a shared filesystem and backing up with the IBM tool.

regards,

Darren.

[Krishna Prasad]

You can use tar or cpio for free. This should be on both machines.

If you have omniback you can install an Agent on AIX. This will help you move data to AIX, however
if you are getting rid of HP this wouldn't be your long term.

[Martin Johnson]

You can use Ignite's make_tape_recovery or one of the other options to make a tape. The tape will be tar compatible.

We use ftp for small files and tar for large files for transfering between AIX and HPUX.

HTH
Marty

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
I am afraid there is no other way. Restore the tapes to a temporary location and transfer to the AIX box and back up with some AIX utility. Or back up again on the HP-UX box in a portable format (as tar or cpio).

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Just like commercial backup formats (Legato, HP's Omniback, Veritas, etc), fbackup is completely proprietary so there is no off-the-shelf method to read the tape on AIX and restore any files. The format of the fbackup format has not been published as far as I know. So you'll have no choice but to create an HP machine on the AIX network to act as a translator (restore to HP-UX is a specific directory structure, then ftp the results to AIX). Note that ftp is quite a bit faster than rcp for large files. However, ftp does not offer a method to transfer all subdirectories so rcp may be the easiest choice.

In Unix, only tar and cpio are industry compatible (but limited to 2Gb files or less). But since you already have the old fbackup tapes, you'll need the transfer system.

[Patrick Wallek]

fbackup is a pure HP-UX backup utility. It was not intended to be portable between different flavors of unix. You can use fbackup between different HP-UX servers, but not between HP-UX and some other unix. It just ain't gonna work.

If you are real industrious, you MIGHT be able to cobble something together with frecover on the HP-UX machine piping the restore output to something that then copies it over to your AIX box.

In the end though, you will almost certainly HAVE to use frecover to read the tape and then go from there.

[Sorrel G. Jakins]

If I were the lucky one who got to do this, I would
1. Restore to HP box
2. NFS export said HP filesystem (fs)
3. NFS mount HP fs from Aix
4. Run IBM backup on the NFS (i.e. HP) filesystem
5. Unmount the NFS fs from aix
6. Test my restore

Not elegant, but easy.
HTH, Sorrel Jakins

[Robert Gamble]

Steve,

As others have mentioned already, you do need the HP-UX restore tapes made with fbackup with frestore.

If time is a contraint, and the old HP machine must leave, you could get another HP system pretty cheaply on eBay. I'm serious, any workstation with appropriate disk space running HP-UX should do the trick, then NFS share the restored data and copy over to the AIX system for further archiving.

I know this isn't what you would like to happen, but consider getting another HP if time is a restraint.

Hope this helps!