Incremental backup

[Rajesh Patel]

Hello,
Would someone be kind enough to let me know what would be a good sequence to follow for incremental backups using fbackup?

We need to keep the backup times to a minimum. i was thinking of 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 starting Sun ending Sat.

Thanks
Rajesh

[Vikas Khator]

Hi Rajesh,

Well your plan's good from time perspective but I have run to ocassional problems with it.

For e.g. if you have a tape failure then you loose data for that particular day . Say Mon user created a file and Friday you need to recover it , if Monday's backup tape is bad you cannot recover it .

On the other hand if you follow
0 5 5 5 5 5 5 scheme you can recover it from Tues/Wed/Thurs tape .

Hope this helps.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi Rajesh.

A way to keep you backup times to the minimum is to triple mirror your database and at backup time split the mirror - so the database runs of two mirrors (Safer), and then backup from the split mirror.

This backup system can all be carried out on the fly.

I would strongly suggest that this is not done on a double mirror as you will be running on a single system whilst the backup is ongoing ? a situation fraught with danger.

A simple script to backup on a triple mirror.

# Split mirror
lvsplit -s _copy /dev/vg01/lvol1
# Make mount point
mkdir /backup
# Mount the split vol
mount /dev/vg01/lvol1_copy /backup
# Backup
/usr/sbin/fbackup -0i /backup -f /dev/rmt/c3t3d0BEST
# Unmount after backup
umount /dev/vg01/lvol1_copy
# Remove mount point
rmdir /backup
# Merge back to live system
lvmerge /dev/vg01/lvol1_copy /dev/vg01/lvol1

HTH

Paula

[Rajesh Patel]

Hi Paula,

i cannot break mirrors as we are using EMC disks as far as i know.

Is there some other better method?

Thanks
Rajesh

[Rajesh Patel]

Hi Paula,

Just found out that we can beak mirrors but we would have to buy another EMC to do that and the company says that they do not wnat to spend that amount of money.

Anyother suggesstions?

Thanks
Rajesh

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Would there be a chance to use cpio instead ?
Attached a script for that.