[aggregate reply to multiple messages] On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Cameron <[email protected]> wrote: > IBM P520 - 2 LPARs - 1 - AIX 5.3, 2 - AIX 6.1 > Need to backup approx 80GB (roughly 40GB per LPAR) > > I was using BE2010 to backup (to tape) my Windows boxes as well as the Unix > clients but I don't *have* to stick with this. I have a spare server > (Windows) that has a tape library attached that I could use (gigbit backbone > for the whole network).
I would generally prefer to do a disk-to-disk backup to the one server, and then backup that one server to tape for offline/offsite backups. > Email of completion status, ease of use for backup/restore. Email is super-easy. Most scheduled things in Unix-land are kicked off from cron, and cron automatically emails job output to the job owner. You will have to be more specific for "ease of use". In particular, note that "easy to use" and "easy to learn" are often inversely proportional, and different people find different UIs easy/hard. The most common drawbacks with a simple tar involve restores: * tar is a sequential format. If the file you want is near the end of the archive, it has to read through everything else first to find it. It is simple and robust, but slow. * Cherry-picking files during a restore can be tedious, if you don't know the exact name. You have to list the archive to get the exact name, then run it again to extract. On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Cameron <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a combination of Pro Isam/Oracle databases and our ERP application and > a few other apps... If the applications keep their files "hot" all the time, you will have to find a way to get said apps to either (1) do an online backup to separate files which you can then backup or (2) temporarily quiesce and make consistent their files on-disk during the backup. > Am I reading correctly that with 'tar', if you wanted to exclude > directories you have to create a file and within that file list them out? It depends on the variant of tar you're using. I'm not familiar with the one that comes with AIX, but GNU tar supports wildcards in its exclusions. > What I wonder is how the performance would be > doing it that way. Would it be better performance to tar on the box and then > copy it to the windows share? It will likely be overall faster to tar directly to the target system. That way you're reading from a local disk and writing to the network, once each. Doing it to local disk first would mean twice as many read operations (once to create the tar archive, then to copy it), and will also cause I/O contention unless you have separate spindles (it will be writing to the same disks it's reading from). > I may have missed reading it, but is there a > way to produce a text file listing of all the files that were sucessfully > tarred? Add the --verbose (-v) switch. Here is an example, using GNU tar and GNU date. AIX variants may not support all the GNU features. However, the GNU variants are available for AIX, so if you don't already have them, get them. :) TODAY=$(date --iso-8601) tar --create --gzip --verbose --totals \ --file=/mnt/backupserver/${HOSTNAME}_${TODAY}.tar.gz \ --files-from=/etc/backup/include \ --exclude-from=/etc/backup/exclude \ > /mnt/backupserver/${HOSTNAME}_${TODAY}.log The first command just saves the date, in YYYY-MM-DD format. The second command does the backup. The option switches are: --create create archive (as opposed to --list, --extract, --diff, etc.) --gzip compress with GNU gzip (if you have more I/O than you do CPU, omit this for speed) --verbose list file paths as they are written (use twice to get file details) --totals print total bytes written and performance at end The last part of the command rewrites output to a file, so you get a log with the file list. Significant messages (errors, etc.) will still print to standard error, so you'll get those on the console or in the cron job email, without being flooded with every single file backed up. The /etc/backup/include file could look like: /etc/ /home/ /usr/local/ The /etc/backup/exclude file could look like: /usr/local/tmp/ *.mp3 *~ You get the idea. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
