Regarding Backup

[Bhushi]

what is differnvce between tar and fbackup.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Primarily, tar is an industry standard format that can be read by any flavor of UNIX. Fbackup is HP-UX only. Fbackup can handle much larger files than tar and is faster but should only be used if you are transferring data from one HP-UX host to another.

[Pete Randall]

tar is common on most versions of unix and can therefore be used to transfer files between those different versions. fbackup/frecover, however, is particular to hp-ux and, therefore, not portable. It also offers more features than tar.


Pete

[Bill Hassell]

tar (and it's relatives cpio, pax, dump, etc) are legacy tools which are low performance backup programs. They are severely limited to small files (less than 9Gb or 2Gb), are single threaded and cannot keep modern tape drives running at full speed. So using these old tools should be limited to small interchanges of data between unlike systems.

fbackup and frecover are the best (free) programs for backing up your system reliably. fbackup starts as many as 6 separate programs to gather data to keep the tape drive busy, can create very long records for ultra-speed tape drives, keeps a complete index of all files at the front of every tape and frecover can restore any file in just a couple of minutes due to high speed search marks. fbackup has many of the features of commercial backup programs, even the ability to add robotic controls for tape changers.

If you have just a couple of servers, fbackup (plus Ignite/UX) is all you need. With lots of production servers, you need a backup application that can track *all* your tapes, the dates they were recorded, the files on each tape and controls for returning outdated tapes to the tape pool.

[Reshma Malusare]

Hi Bhushi,
Tar is unix utility whereas fbackup is HP-ux tool.... we prefer to go for fbackup when file size is larger than 1 gb & whenever you want to communiticate to other hosts...normally tar is used to take backup of files & dir...so used most commonly..

Thanks & Regards
Reshma