Thanks for the reply bakunin. your response shed light on some of the stuff which i always wanted to know. now i am seeing a bigger picture.
Thanks for your time.

regarding my questions;

I understand that,
usually DBA's help us in bringing the database/application to current state (what ever possible using archive logs & transactions logs etc)
They have backups running all the time (incremental as well as full backups - db level)


As an AIX Sys Admin,
I can capture the OS image (rootvg) before making any chnages like upgrade/migration etc. [am not talking about small canges, where we can take file backup using cp command]
and other than that, i can schedule a script which captures mksysb of AIX LPAR every week.

In my scenario, If we do not have any backup tool/products.

How can we backup user data (not OS) on regular basis using OS commands ? incremental or full backups ?


Here am planning to test below on some test server.

a) backup the OS using mksysb on weekly(sunday) basis to a file/directory (for OS) - am aware of this
b) backup all other vg's (user data) on regular basis ?
c) Database level , anyway DBA's can help with their db-level backups (fixed & transaction) - am aware of this

d) Finally if have all these backup strategies in place, how can i bring the system to current state in case of crash ?

OS - i can use mksysb (last sunday)
USER/APP files - ?

I would like to restore OS, user data and all db-level restores to make the system run as before.

Please let me know if this is right way to do it.

Thanks all