Chapter Summary | HP Certified: HP-UX System Administration

Backup and restore are important system administration tasks that ensure data safety. You can take a full backup or an incremental backup depending on the frequency and time needed for the backup process. HP-UX provides a number of utilities for backup and restore. The fbackup / frecover and tar utilities are the most important of these. In addition to these command line tools, you can also use SAM for scheduling backups . All of these methods have their own pros and cons. A particular method is used depending upon requirements.

It is recommended that regardless of the backup type, when using fbackup , backup levels should always be used. Backup level 0 is always a full backup. If a backup is carried out at another level after a full backup, it backs up only those files that have been created or modified after the full backup. Backups created with the fbackup command should routinely use a graph file that contains a list of directories included or excluded from the backup. The fbackup / frecover combination is more flexible but can't be used across different UNIX platforms. The tar command can be used to transfer data from one UNIX system to another and makes better use of the backup media. However, it is not as flexible as fbackup / frecover .

A backup can be restored only on a working system. If the boot disk is damaged, you can recover it with an Ignite-UX recovery tape. After that, you can restore the backed -up data from a full or incremental backup. The make_recovery command is used for creating the Ignite-UX recovery tape and the check_recovery command is used to verify that the recovery tape is up-to-date.

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