Hi,

I am a abit new in AIX system administration field. I want to gather knowledge about backup techniques. As per my knowledge we use Tape archives for taking backups. Can anyone pls explain me in detail abt tape archive? Whether these tape archives come along with the systems or we have to install them seperately?

When we use dump command to take the backups of all the file system does the filesystem automatically gets backed up in the tape archive device? we shall we have to specify the path??

I am not an AIX admin, but Tar and Dump are reasonably alike across UNIXes.

Tar (the Tape ARchiver) was originally meant for writing multiple files to tape. By specifying a file as an output device, it can store several files in a single file (sometimes referred to as a 'tarball').
By compressing the resulting tarball with GZip, several files can be combined into a single, compressed archive.

Dump usually 'dumps' (backs up) the contents of a filesystem to a 'dumpfile'.
This means that all files included in the filesystem are included in the resulting dumpfile. Generally, an entire filesystem is restored in a single 'restore' command.
There are other ways to use dump (HP-UX has a wrapper script named fbackup), where dump performs (incremental) backups of sets of files.


The 'regular' version of tar, dump and restore are usually supplied with any UNIX distribution.
There is a GNU version of Tar that can perform in-line compression, incremental backups and other useful functions.