Question

Backup Procedures?

Asked by: kalmen

Hi All,

I just got an LTO backup tape device for my E450, previously I used to connect to another DLT backup driver on another Solaris machine using rhosts setting. Anyway, my boss wants me to take a full backup (ufsdump) first time, and then take incremental backups during the week for a test, then he wants me to restore something from the middle of the week.

Something new for me. Anyone know any helpfull documents? Any personal experiences? and how would you retrieve from the backup with an incremental backup being done?

Thanks.

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Asked On
2005-04-09 at 22:39:44ID21383072
Tags

ufsdump

,

backup

Topic

Sun Solaris

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: neteducationPosted on 2005-04-10 at 02:01:47ID: 13746475

- You physicaly connect your drive to your machine
- You run devfsadm to have the system rescan your hardware
- You check your /dev/rmt-Directory for newly created devices. There will be about 20 called i.e. 1,1n,1l,1ln and so on.
- Then let's suppose you have three partitions: /,/usr and /export/home... and you want to backup all of them onto one tape... so you do the following:

ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1n /
ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1n /usr
ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1 /export/home

Using device /dev/rmt/1n means no rewind after usage. on your last session you use /dev/rmt/1 which means rewind the tape

During the week you do usfdump 1vf /dev/rmt/.... (same as before, but dumplevel 1) which does an incremental backup since last level 0, or you could use level1 on monday, level 2 on tuesday level3 on wednesday and so on... which would backup only the differences since last day.

to restore you put the tape with the full backup and wind the tape to the correct possition, using mt-command. let's suppose you want to restore /export/home-partition, then you use

mf -f /dev/rmt/1n fsf 2

(which forwards the tape 2 sessions)

and then

ufsrestore rvf /dev/rmt/1 to restore the entire partition.

for more details see manpages of ufsdump/ufsrestore... they explain it pretty well

 

by: kalmenPosted on 2005-04-10 at 04:32:52ID: 13746732

Very nice! Do you know how I could do consequent levels using a crontab?

 

by: neteducationPosted on 2005-04-10 at 14:30:17ID: 13748954

well you put all the sessions into a shell-script and start the apropriate script at the apropriate day... let's say you put

ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1n /
ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1n /usr
ufsdump 0vf /dev/rmt/1 /export/home

into a script that starts at the weekend

and

ufsdump 1vf /dev/rmt/1n /
ufsdump 1vf /dev/rmt/1n /usr
ufsdump 1vf /dev/rmt/1 /export/home

into another script that starts during weekdays (in the evening)

so in case of failure you need 2 tapes... the one of the weekend and the one from last night.


or

you create 5 script, one with level 0, one with level 1, one with level 2 and so on.

then you start level0-script at the weekend, level 1 script on monday evening, level 2 script on tuesday evening and so on.

this  second version means that only the changes since last day are backed up during weekdays (as opposed to the solution above where everything since last weekend was backed up), which makes backup faster during the week, but in case of failure on a friday youwould need 5 tapes to restore everything (weekendtape and the ones from every evening)

 

by: yuzhPosted on 2005-04-10 at 17:47:55ID: 13749549

neteducation has pointed you to the right direction, for full system backup you need to
check /etc/vfstab  to find out the  partitions you have, and then use ufsdump to the tape:

eg,

if you have / /usr /var /export partitions, and the tape drive name is /dev/rmt/0n
(replace it with your real divice name), you do:

  mt -f /dev/rmt/0 rewind

   $ for fs in / /usr /var /export ; do
     /usr/sbin/ufsdump 0cf /dev/rmt/0n $fs
   done

   see http:Q_20273285.html for more details.

You can alway put the commands in a script and use cron to run the script .

 

by: kalmenPosted on 2005-04-12 at 00:57:35ID: 13760074

Thanks to both of you.

Cheers...

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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