[Sunhelp] Re: Backup help!

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Tue 2000-09-12 (13:49), Adams, Christopher wrote:
> Anyone know of any good "free" back-up software for Solaris 7?  I'm
> currently faced with backing up a critical directory:
> 
> This partition contains "very"critical data for my company.  Working on
> limited resources I have been using "ufsdump" to backup the entire partition
> each time to an individual file and then copying the file across the network
> (slow) to a tape backup on another Solaris box. 

What about mirroring the whole volume to another disk/partition
(using rsync e.g., but Veritas has tools, too)? You could backup
that partition afterwards.
rsync is very fast in synchronizing large file systems which get
moderately modified.

And most backup software can access remote tape drives. If not,
you could still ufsdump to stdout and pipe that to a rsh, I guess.
(BTW, can some kind soul tell me something about the record structure
of an ufsdump tape?)

  In order to get a very
> accurate backup I have to umount the /ServerData partition and then do the
> ufsdump of this partition to a file.  My reason for using ufsdump was
> because we have about 6 gigs of files in /ServerData and my company wishes
> to have all of this backed up or at least to have the partition re-mounted
> and back online in under 1 hour.  The ufsdump seemed to be fast enough to do
> this.  Tar was too slow it seemed and a standard "cp" command to the tape
> device was a nightmare time wise.

In most cases, rsync would need only minutes since only differences are
transmitted, and if you're doing it locally it will be really fast.
After that, you could continue working with your hot volume and backup
the mirror. Depending on the tape drive being used you'd expect about
500KB/s (DDS-3) - that's 30MB/min or about 3 hours per 6GB, even less
if data is compressible. In this case, network bandwidth usually won't 
limit throughput. DLT will be faster, of course...

> My company no longer wants me to umount the partition to do the ufsdump
> (making my dump very inaccurate).  They would rather not pay money for
> expensive backup software either, so this leaves me a bit in a bind.

Well, they will give you the $100 for a medium-sized disk, won't they?

> Thanks again Solaris Gods!

No god, still learning too, regards, Steffen

-- 
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