incremental fbackup strategy

[Adegoke Apalara]

I am the UNIX administrator of a financial insttitution and am about to change the backup and recovery strategy being used to that of incremental fbackup/frecover.
I have resolved to use a 2 level recovery method on a 40GB database containing about 130,000 files,in which i take a full backup(0) every month and a incremental backup daily (1), since file changes are stable within the month.
We take a backup before and after processing of the days transactions because files are updated during processing
My concern is that during the end-of-day processing and if a CORRUPTION occures, if i restore my backup before, there is a tendency that files were updated during the processing period that were not backed-up before i started the daily process. HOW CAN I PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF MY BACKUP FROM THIS LOOP-HOLE.
Can you devise a suitable back-up startegy.
Thanks
Goke A.F

[Jarle Bjorgeengen]

First of all:

do you shut down the database before running backups ? If you don't , or you have some sort of backup mode you can put it insto, you will be backing up inconstant data, and you will never be able to restore a functional database.

Did you do a full restore test at any point in time ?

It sounds like you need a more fleksible backup tool, like omniback (or dataprotector as it is called these days).

Omniback has integration-packages to make online backups of the most known databases including oracle, sybase, informix.

Rgds Jarle

[twang]

You cannot simply perform incremental backup of a database system using fbackup/frecover, to save time in performing backup, you may use omniback or RMAN (if oracle).

[Steven E. Protter]

Okay,

First of all, you are in a Linux forum. fbackup doesn't come with Linux, its a HP-UX product.

That being said, fbackup will only work on down databases. If the database has recently been turned over and there are no transactions it might get you a clean fuzzy backup but seriously, you don't want to deal with that.

rman to disk however will make very nice backups that fbackup can pick up no problem.

If you are trying to use fbackup on an HP-Ux box to backup files on Linux then you'll need to use CIFS/9000 client on the HP-UX side and samba on the Linux side or NFS to open up the filesystems. All of the above still applies.

Good Luck,

SEP

[Adegoke Apalara]

Thanks,
But i am on a HP Unix 11.0 platform.Since it's a financial inst, what happens is that at the beginning of the day transactions are posted wich are backed up at the end of the day BEFORE the daily processing.
Duing the processing period files are updated.
IF at this point the processing CRASHES, and i restore the most recent backup(before processing) files updated during that period are "missed" if they were not initailly backed-up(using incremental FBACKUP)!!!
What can i do to get arount this

Just remembered, are their any patches to increase my frecover speed, it's taking about 6 hours for 38GB of data(120,000).
Goke

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi Goke,

But you still are in a Linux forum and you may miss many HP experts, which are not also here to look. You may want to open a thread in the HP section with just a link to here.
The files must be somewhere, if on an earlier backup. Keep the indices of the backup on disk, so you can find easily the tape the file is on. Do you mean new files? Cant you just rerun the processing after the restore?

does that make sense?

Michael

[John Meissner]

one thing we do to prevent corrumpion from open files durring backup is to mirror to another BVC and then split it for backups... after the backups are finished we sync the disks back and everyone is happy.. this allows for live backups regardless of transactions taking place. you could do a full backup every night if you wanted to then.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Well working with a financial institution I can tell what we do. We do actually do have a data file that contains all files that might get updated during end-of-day processing. >>All<< of these files are saved to backup before we start "batch", so in case of problems we are able to restore the pre bactch state. touch would be one way to enforce the (incremental) backup in Unix I suppose.