HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90011, September 2010)

Data Backups
At any point in time, data can be copied using any one of a number of utilities. The destination
for the copies of data can be removable media that can be stored off site or shipped to another
location for safe keeping. Removable media that can be used for backups include:
• other disks
• magnetic tapes
— DLT
— DDS
• optical discs
— recordable DVDs
— recordable CDs
— magneto-optical disk libraries
You can even back up files to a file on an alternate disk (as in the case of a tar archive).
Backup Utilities
There are many utilities in HP-UX to backup your data:
• pax
The pax command extracts, writes, and lists archive files and copies files and directory
hierarchies. A more contemporary utility, pax performs basically the same functions as the
older (still available) utilities cpio and tar. For details about pax, see pax(1).
• shar
The shar command bundles the named files and directories into a single distribution package
suitable for mailing or moving. The files can contain any data, including executables. The
resulting package, written to standard output, is a shell script file that can be edited (for
example, to add messages at the beginning).
• vxdump
vxdump copies to magnetic tape all files in a VxFS file system that have been changed after
a certain date. See vxdump(1M).
• fbackup (recover data using frecover), an HP-UX specific backup utility for backing data
up to the previous media types.
• tar
tar (called the “tape archiver”) can write to disk archive files or optical media. tar is
compatible with many other operating systems, including other versions of UNIX, Linux,
and Microsoft Windows.
• cpio
The cpio command saves and restores archives of files on magnetic tape, other devices, or
a regular file, and copies files from one directory to another while replicating the directory
tree structure. When cpio completes processing the files, it reports the number of blocks
written.
In addition to backing up to removable media, you can copy important files to another system
using ftp, rcp, or (for secure copies) sftp.
How Storage is Addressed
The various components that comprise the HP-UX storage stack are addressed in different ways:
Storage on HP-UX 51