AIX

Currently I am backing up AIX to tape. I would like to setup a back that goes to another server either windows or linux that we already backup and send offsite automatically. Is this possible?

Thanks

What do you mean by "backup AIX"? If you want a (bootable) image of your system to be able to restore the machine with all customizations use a "mksysb" image (see the man page of the command "mksysb" for more information). In fact it is recommended to take this mksysb image to another server - your NIM server. you can boot your system (or clone another) from there using the image as installation source. the NIM server has to be an AIX machine too, though, so neither Linux nor Windows.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Using mksysb is just great. It is, however, another reason to keep your rootvg as small and empty as you can. The mksysb script will write (along with the boot image and other bits to get you going) the contents of all mounted filesystems within rootvg unless you choose to exclude some files (see the manual pages for this) and you probably have both a finite limit on your media or at least you will want to the backup & restore to run quickly.

Other volume groups are ignored, but you can help yourself by taking structural images of them (writing the output into rootvg) before running the mksysb

it is a relatively simple process to re-build the empty volume groups after the OS recovery is complete and you can then restore the data according to your normal procedures. I even have a server with simple disks and LVM mirrors that I recover to a server with SAN disk, so no LVM mirrors. This is more complex on the backup, but can still be done.

You could backup to a local NIM server and then copy the image to a NIM server for the recovery site, if you have the needs and the available hardware.

Can you describe more about your infrastructure, recovery needs, available hardware, etc.



Thanks, in advance,
Robin

I do a mksysb to tape twice a month. Daily there is backup run to tape of a datavg that is on the system. I have a Windows server that acts as a BDR fro the windows and linux servers. I do an image back up of the servers. At night these backups are sent offsite. Dealing with tapes is annoying compared to everything else. I would like to find a way to just backup the datavg nightly. Ideally sending it to a mount on the linux server that gets backed up and sent offsite.

Now, this is a description we can make suggestions for. Investigate a "savevg datavg" (read the man page of "savevg" command for details) and use an NFS mount as target of the output. How much data are (roughly) involved? It might be a good idea to compress the resulting image somehow ("compress", "gzip", ...) before writing it to a share, but this is difficult to suggest given the sparse desccription of your surroundings: network bandwidth, data amounts involved, type of media involved, etc..

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I would ask you to consider also the effort in recovering if you don't have good, current backups stored in another site if you lose your building. Moving media can be tedious, but the alternative could be very costly, as either you have some remote replication in play or you lose everything.

Whilst backup to another local server will give you options to recover with if you damage your server somehow, such as accidentally deleting some critical data, you need to consider how you will recover if you lose access to the building too, balancing what is acceptable against the cost.



Robin