Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!daver!kcdev!gentry
From: gentry@kcdev.UUCP (Art Gentry)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: fbackup
Summary: HP HP-UX backups
Keywords: HP HPUX backups
Message-ID: <1066@kcdev.UUCP>
Date: 28 Feb 90 15:24:42 GMT
References: <1990Feb24.214030.4541@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> <625@prcrs.UUCP>
Reply-To: gentry@kcdev. (Art Gentry)
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Kansas City, Mo.
Lines: 45

In article <625@prcrs.UUCP> paul@prcrs.UUCP (Paul Hite) writes:
>In article <1990Feb24.214030.4541@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu>, richard@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (richard Congdon) writes:
>> 
>> Since it looked like it might be a better of of backing up, I
>> thought I'd try fbackup instead of dump. 
>
> [sad story about the affairs of using fbackup deleted for brevity]
>
>fbackup is much too complex for the simple task it tries to perform.  This
>needless complexity makes me suspect that fbackup is hopeless.  I don't have 
>much faith in our ability to restore files from from our backup tapes and I'm 
>very sorry that I ever heard of fbackup.
 
I have to agree whole heartily!  That is the reason I wrote my own backup
scripts.  Basicly, on a per file system basis, I find all the files, sort
the list and feed it to cpio and update a file that shows when the last 
dump was made.  Amoung other things, it makes restorals about as painless
as possible, I can easily and quickly restore any single file, directory
of files or an entire file system.  I do this once a week.  Every evening,
run by cron, I have another script that goes out and finds every file that
has been added/modified in the previous 24 hours and dumps them to tape in
cpio format, again, very easy to do restores from.  I am a firm believer in
the KISS principle, why frecover/fbackup is so damn comlex is totally
beyond me!
 
>You mention that you currently use dump/restore.  What do you think of them?
>dump/restore looks good as long as you use one tape per file system, but we
>have too many filesystems for that.  The BSD dump has the length of the tape
>built into the program, does the HP version?  We have a compressing tape drive
>but if dump doesn't know the true capacity of the tape then the compression
>won't do us much good.

You could use my same process and save multiple file systems to a single
tape.  I do one file system/one tape, just to keep things a little simpler.

These scripts are available on the Interex (HP International Users Group)
Contributed Software Library tape, avaliable from Interex, 585 Maude Ct.
Sunnyvale, CA 94088 (408) 738-4848.


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