Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Managing Disks and Files
Backing Up Data
Chapter 6674
Backing Up Data
Of all the tasks that system administrators perform, among the most
important are creating system backups. The most effective way to ensure
against loss of your system’s data is to copy the data from your system
onto storage media (such as magnetic tape or optical disk) that you can
store away from your system, so that you can recover the data should
something happen to your primary copies. Data can also be shipped over
a network to a computer at a different location. The important thing is to
have copies of all your important files somewhere other than on your
system.
HP-UX has a number of utilities for backup and recovery. This discussion
focuses on the fbackup/frecover commands (used by SAM), OmniBack
II, tar, and cpio. Online backup of a JFS snapshot file system is also
explained. Refer to the HP-UX Reference for information on the other
backup and restore utilities: dump, ftio, pax, restore, rrestore,
vxdump, and vxrestore.
The following topics are described in this section:
• “Choosing the Type of Storage Device” on page 675
• “Choosing a Backup/Recovery Utility” on page 676
• “Determining What Data to Back Up” on page 681
• “Determining How Often to Back Up Data” on page 682
• “Full Backups vs. Incremental Backups” on page 682
• “Choosing SAM for Backup” on page 677
• “Backing Up Your Data Using the fbackup Command” on page 685
• “Backing Up Files on a Remote System” on page 689
• “Setting Up an Automated Backup Schedule” on page 690
• “Creating an Automated Backup Schedule” on page 690
• “Activating an Automated Backup Schedule” on page 692
• “Backing Up If You Are Using LVM” on page 692
• “Backing Up Large Files” on page 693
• “Backing Up a JFS Snapshot File System” on page 694