HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90023, September 2010)

computing environment, minimizing the downtime that can
result from the loss of use of a specific server or some of its
peripherals.
This section deals with data backups. For additional information on the other ways of
protecting your data (mentioned above), see “Using High Availability Strategies”
(page 201).
There are many utilities to back up your data to offline media (for example, optical
media or magnetic tape such as DLT cartridges).
Table 3-3 compares several commonly used utilities based on many important backup
criteria. This discussion focuses on the file backup and file recovery procedures of HP
Data Protector, pax, tar, and cpio. Online backup of a VxFS snapshot file system is
also explained. See the HP-UX Reference for information on the other backup and
restore utilities: dump, ftio, restore, rrestore, vxdump, and vxrestore.
The following topics are described in this section:
• “Choosing the Type of Storage Device” (page 121)
• “Choosing a Backup/Recovery Utility” (page 122)
• “Determining What Data to Back Up” (page 125)
• “Determining How Often to Back Up Data” (page 126)
• “Full Backups vs. Incremental Backups” (page 126)
• “Setting Up an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 132)
• “Creating an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 133)
• “Activating an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 134)
• “Backing Up If You Are Using LVM” (page 134)
• “Backing Up Large Files” (page 135)
• “Backing Up a VxFS Snapshot File System” (page 136)
Choosing the Type of Storage Device
When you evaluate which media to use to back up your data, consider the following:
• How much data do you need to back up (rough estimate)?
• How quickly will you need to retrieve the data?
• What types of storage devices do you have access to?
• How automated do you want the process to be? (For example, will an operator be
executing the backup interactively or will it be an unattended backup?)
• How quickly will you need to complete a backup?
NOTE: To ensure against the possible destruction of your system and its data, store
the backup media away from your system.
Use Table 3-2: “Criteria for Selecting Media ” (page 122) to help you determine which
storage device to use for your backups. This table compares the supported device types
Backing Up Data 121