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midwestexp

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Need to make single tape backup of RS/6000

Totally new to AIX and just found out I'll have to start backing up our RS/6000 weekly. I've already gone through one round of backing it up and had to use 5 tapes per the instructions I was given.

(1)Tape for mksysb
(3)Tapes for each of the various volume groups
(1)Tape for rootvg

From what I have read there is a way I could put this to nearly one tape. This is a quote from another post.

You could do an entire system backup on a single tape, e.g.
mksysb -i /dev/rmt0n; savevg -f /dev/rmt0n vg _1; savevg -f /dev/rmt0n vg _2;...

Is this the best way to do it? I've read in other posts you should keep your mksysb on a seperate tape, true? If I keep this to one tape, can someone give the command I would use to restore a vg from this single tape?
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prof666

I have always kept my mksysb tape separate from any other for the reason that I may want to restore / archive off my other volume groups more often, which would require spooling through the portion of the tape that contained the mksysb (putting additional time into a job and also stressing the tape more that is required.)
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cpc2004
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Prof666 - So the only real reason to put mksysb to its own tape is just for time saving when it comes to restoring?

cpc2004 - What you're saying is that the extra rootvg backup I was doing is redundant because the mksysb is already saving that information? I'm not sure I quite understand the last portion of your response. What is a PV? How can I find out if I have more than one PV in a VG?
Bootable mksysb tape are made up of four images: the boot image. The BOS Install/Maintenance image, the toc image and the system backup Image. The first three files must be created with a tape block_size value of 512. The second and fourth images are stored in backup/restore format.
Example: Restore ./var/adm/ras/errlog
tctl -f/dev/rmt0.1 rewind
tctl -f/dev/rmt0.1 fsf  3
restore -rvf /dev/rmt0.1 ./var/adm/ras/errlog

PV means physical volume
lssue commnd lspv to display the status of all the physical volumes.
Hoping I'll have access to the box tomorrow to do some testing and find out for sure how many PVs there are. Provided each VG has only one PV, is it safe to say that the following command will give me a full system backup?

mksysb -i /dev/rmt0n; savevg -f /dev/rmt0n vg _1; savevg -f /dev/rmt0n vg _2;savevg -f /dev/rmt0n vg_3
This command generate the script save_vg.sh. If you have 10 application vg, it generates 10 savevg statements.

lsvg | grep -v rootvg |awk '{ print "savevg -f /dev/rmt0  " $1}' > save_vg.sh

savevg -f /dev/rmt0 vg _1
savevg -f /dev/rmt0 vg _2
savevg -f /dev/rmt0 vg_3
Should consider sysback product

Try Tivoli Storage Manager for sysback.

It met your requirement.