HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

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 Appendix A (page 205).
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
fbackup, 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” (page 123)
• “Choosing a Backup/Recovery Utility” (page 124)
• “Determining What Data to Back Up” (page 127)
• “Determining How Often to Back Up Data” (page 128)
• “Full Backups vs. Incremental Backups” (page 128)
• “Backing Up Your Data Using the fbackup Command ” (page 130)
• “Backing Up Files on a Remote System” (page 134)
• “Setting Up an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 134)
• “Creating an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 135)
• “Activating an Automated Backup Schedule” (page 136)
• “Backing Up If You Are Using LVM” (page 137)
• “Backing Up Large Files” (page 137)
• “Backing Up a JFS Snapshot File System” (page 138)
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?
Backing Up Data 123