On 18/08/11 05:07, Chris Lee wrote: > 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.
Something nobody's mentioned - do you have raid of any sort? Could you add mirroring to your server if you don't have it already? Not knowing AIX/RS6000s, I don't know how much that would cost to add, but drives are dirt cheap nowadays. Drives certified for an IBM mini, though ... :-) > > 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. 15Gb! at a few tens of pounds/dollars for a terabyte drive, surely it's not expensive to add mirroring? > >>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 ? > As others have mentioned, you can pause the database. If you've got a mirror then DBPAUSE the database, break the mirror, and DBRESUME. You can now back up the broken mirror, safe in the knowledge that all the files are internally self-consistent. I think DBPAUSE guarantees the integrity of transactions, but if you backup both the /uv and the /uvaccounts directories, then you should get the transaction logs as well, I hope :-) If you need to recover, you just point another instance of the UV program at your backed-up files. Only thing to bear in mind is, it must be same-endian. I've copied UV files at the disk level between SCO, NT and linux (all on Intel) and UV doesn't give a monkeys about where the file(s) came from - if the VOC pointers are okay then the file is okay. Cheers, Wol _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
