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

• Included Files
Included files are directories and files to include in your backup. When you specify
a directory, all of the files and subdirectories are included in the backup. Identify
includes files with the -i option of the fbackup command or with a graph file
(see the following definition).
• Excluded files
Excluded files are files within your included directories to excluded from the
backup. In other words, they are the exceptions. Identify excluded files with the
-e option to the fbackup command or with a graph file (described below).
• Graph files
Graph files are text files that contain a list of directories and files to back up. If you
us HP SMH to back up your system, HP SMH creates the graph files for you ( in
/etc/sam/br) usinmg the included and excluded files. Graph files contain one
entry per line. Entries that begin with the character i indicate included files; those
that begin with the character e indicate excluded files. For example:
i /home
e /home/deptD
The above file will cause all of the directory /home with the exception of
/home/deptD to be backed up.
You can identify a graph file with the -g option of the fbackup command.
Determining How Often to Back Up Data
Evaluate the applications running on your system and the needs of your users to
determine how critical the data on your system is to them. Consider the following:
• How often do the contents of files change?
• How critical is it that files’ contents be up-to-date?
• Can the files be recreated or recovered from an alternate source?
Full Backups vs. Incremental Backups
Once you have identified a list of files to include and exclude, decide whether you want
all of the files represented by your list to be backed up (a full backup) or only those
files that have changed or that have been created since the last time you backed up this
set of files (incremental backup).
Incremental backups can save you a lot of time if only a small percentage of files in a
backup set have changed since the last time a backup was performed. Full backups
ensure that each file in a backup set is captured at the time the backup is performed
(regardless of when or how often it was previously backed up).
126 Managing Systems