Backing Up Your System

In addition to your normal, periodic system backup procedures, you should create a network backup of your root volume group (see Chapter 5 “Cold-Installing HP-UX 11i v2”). Do this first before performing a cold-install, and again after the cold-install. If a problem occurs, it’s a very simple procedure to restore the system to its original state.

This section offers several alternatives for performing system backups: fbackup and frecover, and make_net_recovery and make_tape_recovery.

Using fbackup and frecover

Many administrators use the basic fbackup command to back up the entire system to tape. You do not need to unmount any imported file systems; fbackup does not cross NFS boundaries unless specified.

Using the normal tape location to do a full backup, insert a new tape and enter:

fbackup -f/dev/rmt/0m -i -v

Later, if you wish to return the system to its previous state, use the frecover command. See the fbackup(1M) manpage for examples.

Ignite-UX recovery commands

For recovering a system, a better alternative to using fbackup and frecover is to use the make_net_recovery or make_tape_recovery commands available with Ignite-UX, which offer more flexibility than fbackup and frecover, including the ability to recover non-bootable systems.

The Ignite-UX server software for HP-UX 11i v2 is provided on the HP-UX 11i v2 DVD, and can be cold-installed or updated along with HP-UX 11i v2 to create or update a new server. See “Updating Your Ignite-UX Server” for details.

Using make_net_
recovery

The Ignite-UX server has the make_net_recovery command to create a system recovery archive on another system on the network. The archive created by make_net_recovery is specific to the system it was created for and its identity includes hostname, IP_address, networking information, and so on. In the event of a root disk failure, you use the Ignite-UX server to restore the system by installing the recovery archive.

The contents of the system recovery archive always includes all files and directories which are essential to bringing up a functional system. This “essential” list is pre-defined by make_net_recovery. You can run make_net_recovery in its interactive mode to review the directories and files which make up the “essential list,” and also add or remove other data from the archive on a disk/volume group, file, or directory basis.

For more information on using make_net_recovery, see the make_net_recovery(1M) manpage or the Ignite-UX Administration Guide.

Using make_tape_
recovery

The Ignite-UX server’s make_tape_recovery command creates a bootable recovery tape for an LVM or whole disk file system while it is up and running. When a system has a logical volume layout, the recovery tape will only include data from the root volume group, plus data from any non-root volume group containing the /usr directory.

You can run make_tape_recovery either on the Ignite-UX server or locally on the system from which you are trying to make a recovery tape.

To create the bootable recovery tape, enter:

/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av

where: v is for verbose mode and A specifies the entire root disk or volume group. Also, more than one volume group can be specified with the -x option.

If a tape drive other than the default (/dev/rmt/0m) will be used, modify the command to point to the device you want to use, for example a tape drive at /dev/rmt/3mn:

/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av -d /dev/rmt/3mn

To recover a failed system disk or volume group after a recovery tape has been made, simply load the recovery tape, boot the system, interrupting the boot sequence to redirect to the tape drive. Allow the install process to complete. Do not intervene. The system will reboot and, because map files for all associated volume groups have been saved on the tape, any other existing volume groups are imported and mounted automatically. Data which is not in the root volume group must be backed up and recovered using normal backup utilities.

For more information on using make_tape_recovery, see the make_tape_recovery(1M) manpage on an Ignite-UX server or the Ignite-UX Administration Guide. The guide is available on the HP-UX 11i v2 Instant Information CD and at this web site:

http://docs.hp.com/