[benmartins]

I wondering if anyone has done backup and restore of an AIX server using Sysback and would like to share some pointers with me.

[cdelgadop]

Hi

Yes, i used sysback to clone an old server having one 8mm tape i could not connect to my p570 server. So i installed sysback on one server with a 4mm tape and installed sysback in the source server. Configured remotes server services as well as remote client services on each end and ran smitty "sb_backup" and made a rootvg backup to the shared tape device in the sysback server.

Once finished i assigned the 4mm tape device to my new LPAR and started in SMS mode and boot the server using this tape. Then you can apply the same procedure used to restore a mksysb image.

Hope this helps

[benmartins]

I have a tape that I am going to attach directly to this server,how do I go from there.I am new to all this.

[Mtnduey]

Here is one tested solution (assumes your aix install was set to install all software for recovery to any hardware platform).

1) DVD RAM backups take a very long time as the write speed to DVDRAM is quite slow. Read speeds are fantastic but write speed isnt. So recovery speed is high, backup speed is not.
2) the "mkcd" command requires you to have a /mkcd path defined that has enough storage room to make some images to burn to DVD. If you do not have a non-rootvg on your system with 6-8+ gb free space you can always make a soft link for /mkcd to a SAN path if you like. Size needed for your mkcd image varies from system to system, could be as low as ~1.5gb or you may even need multiple DVD-RAMs depending on the size of your rootvg. If you are following best practices & keeping rootvg to only OS data you should only need 1 DVDRAM disk. You can always back up extensive user /home data to tape tar if there is a lot of data in /home and you dont have them pointed to SAN storage.

Anyhow...

Mksysb: Depending on what exactly you are doing, you can use the -m (generates map file) -p (disables compression/packaging. -p is a good idea if backing up to tape) option flags. If you need to exclude any path in the rootvg you can use the -e option.

mksysb -iX /pathto/servername_mksysb_`date +%m%d%Y`
mkcd -d /dev/cd0 -L -m /pathto/mksysb_image

hope this helps

[Varunkumar]

Originally Posted by benmartins

I have a tape that I am going to attach directly to this server,how do I go from there.I am new to all this.

hello,

i want to take backup to DVD in p series server, so how can i do that?
Can anyone tell the procedure to do it.
but empty DVd cant be mount , rite?

[mari83]

mkdvd -d /dev/cd0 will work

or

1. smit mkdvd
2. select no in the existing mksysb imgae ( if u want do create new image)
3.then selcet CD format
4. select the DVD device then enter


It wil take only rootvg. For me it is taking around 4 hours to write a bootable DVD.

But the recovery is very fast.