Chris, add the options "-notag -limit 1" to your command line.
The "-notag" stops UV from updating the header of each record after it is included in the backup. The "-limit 1" stops uvbackup from trying to use the shared-memory "feature", which can severely impact the performance. The uvbackup command is the only one I know of that tests the integrity of the database structures as it goes. Filesystem-based backup of UV datafiles are ok so long as all changes have been flushed to disk prior to the backup starting and no files get changes during the backup process. To be certain that the files are ok, you need to suspend database writes, do the backup, then resume database writes. Other options are to suspend database writes, tape a snapshot of the filesystem, resume database writes, mount the snapshot in another filesystem then perform the backup. Gregor -----Original Message----- From: u2-users-boun...@listserver.u2ug.org [mailto:u2-users-boun...@listserver.u2ug.org] On Behalf Of Chris Lee Sent: Thursday, 18 August 2011 2:07 PM To: U2 Users List Subject: [U2] UniVerse backups to disk Hi All, We're running UniVerse 10.1.17 on AIX 5.3 and the backup feature included within our vendors software is pretty basic and only allows backups of Universe to tape. I'm going to continue running backups to tape on a nightly basis, but I'd also like to automate backups over the network to another file server so that if I'm not around to swap tapes they'll continue being backed up, as well as all the benefits of having extra copies in case a tape fails. What's the best way to achieve this, is it necessary to use UniVerse's built-in "uvbackup" utility ? I currently have a FreeNAS server setup in another building using rsync (the rsnapshot utility - http://rsnapshot.org/) to copy the files directly at the operating system level onto the FreeNAS box, however I've no way of really verifying the validity of these files copied over as to whether the server was in the midst of rewriting a file at the time it was copied. The FreeNAS rsnapshot setup appears to be doing a good job at copying the files and helps me rotate the backups through hourly, daily, weekly snapshots. It tries to save disk space by hard linking the rotated snapshots and only copying the changed files, however the problem is it validates the change by timestamp on the file, and of course when uvbackup runs each night it updates the timestamp on *every* file and hence each daily snapshot I end up with another entire copy of all the files when it probably wasn't necessary. If uvbackup is the way to go, what command line options should I be looking at ? I've read the examples in IBM's Universe admin manual but it doesn't give any examples of backup to to disk paths... Our current backup is about 15GB of data to tape, backing up our entire /UVdata directory and all the accounts under that. I'd like to do the same full backups to disk. >From what I've pieced together in the manual the way to do this would be something like:- $ find /UVdata -print | uvbackup -f -v -l "FULL UVDATA BACKUP" - > /remote.nfsshare/UVdata Once that's done I'm guessing I could then bundle that remote UVdata backup into a tarball and compress it to save space and keep several backups on disk. Any suggestions on the above would be greatly appreciated. Very interested to hear if "uvbackup" is necessary or not... I asked one of the guys from our software vendor in the past and he felt the files should be fine being backed up directly to another machine (ie: even via FTP) without uvbackup, but I'm not convinced myself that you could be 100% sure of the integrity of the files if you do a direct disk copy since how would you know if the server had some writes in a buffer it hadn't yet flushed or was in the middle of rewriting a file, or does it really not matter a great deal ? Thanks, Chris _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users -- Message protected by DealerGuard: e-mail anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering. http://www.pentanasolutions.com Click here to report this message as spam: https://login.mailguard.com.au/report/1CWgZEQvxW/1HpKcaS1Mr3xxV6sO44hVn/0 This email and any attachments to it are confidential. You must not use, disclose or act on the email if you are not the intended recipient. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation. _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
