VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Troubleshooting Guide

Chapter 5 59
5 Backing Up and Restoring Disk
Group Configurations
Disk group configuration backup and restoration allows you to backup and restore all
configuration data for VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) disk groups, and for VxVM objects
such as volumes that are configured within the disk groups. Using this feature, you can
recover from corruption of a disk group’s configuration that is stored as metadata in the
private region of aVM disk. After the disk group configuration has been restored, and the
volume enabled, the user data in the public region is available again without the need to
restore this from backup media.
CAUTION The backup and restore utilities act only on VxVM configuration data. They do
not back up or restore any user or application data that is contained within
volumes or other VxVM objects. If you use vxdiskunsetup and vxdisksetup
on a disk, and specify attributes that differ from those in the configuration
backup, this may corrupt the public region and any user data therein.
The vxconfigbackupd daemon monitors changes to the VxVM configuration and
automatically records any configuration changes that occur. Two utilities, vxconfigbackup
and vxconfigrestore, are provided for backing up and restoring a VxVMconfiguration for a
disk group.
When importing a disk group, any of the following errors indicate that the disk group
configuration and/or disk private region headers have become corrupted:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-569 Disk group group,Disk disk:Cannot auto-import
group: reason
The reason for the error is usually one of the following:
Configuration records are inconsistent
Disk group has no valid configuration copies
Duplicate record in configuration
Errors in some configuration copies
Format error in configuration copy
Invalid block number
Invalid magic number
If VxVM cannot update a disk group’s configuration because of disk errors, it disables the disk
group and displays the following error:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-123 Disk group group: Disabled by errors