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Operating Systems AIX AIX 7.2 MKSYSB Backup and Restore Best Practices? Post 303033848 by c3rb3rus on Friday 12th of April 2019 10:57:11 AM
Old 04-12-2019
AIX 7.2 MKSYSB Backup and Restore Best Practices?

Hello,

Running AIX 7.2 on Power9 bare-metal (no LPAR and no NIM server), in the process of creating a guide on MKSYSB process.

I understand that MKSYSB is a backup of the rootvg and we can exclude stuff via exclude.rootvg file, the rest of the data volumes are mapped to the system as LUNs via multi-path FC connection to a SAN and that is backed up separately. The rootvg does not boot off SAN, it has two internal NVMe disks.

In the event that rootvg is corrupt and we need to restore rootvg , the process would be to modify the bootlist and reboot into SMS via SSH/Console or using the ASMI service processor.

Are there any critical steps we need to do pre or post-rootvg restore?
  • Currently the rootvg is mirrored, once restored will it remain mirrored?
  • Will i need to mess with the bootlist at all?
  • Will the configuration of the external filesystems be preserved and mounted ready to use (if set to auto-mount at boot)?
  • Running a power system in 24x7 prodution after a MKSYSB restore is viable or should one plan for a fresh re-install of AIX from install media at some point?
  • Does one need access to AIX 7.2 install media at any point during a MKSYSB restore?

The Power9 system has a LTO tape library which is where I was going to write the MKSYSB backup to and boot off, there is no CD-ROM but there is USB - is it possible to boot MKSYSB off USB? Any cons or pros going with tape vs. USB? Most of the guides out there refer to a tape or dvd, though many of them were written years ago.

My plan is to learn from experience and create a MKSYSB via mksysb -iev /dev/rmt0, corrupt rootvg by rm -rf /etc, and reboot. I am pretty sure it will become very unhappy with a missing /etc - so proceed with another reboot (via FPO using Control Panel or ASMI) and boot to SMS for a MKSYSB restore.

Mainly looking for best practices / tips / suggestions around the process.
 

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backintime(1)							   USER COMMANDS						     backintime(1)

NAME
backintime - a simple backup tool for Linux. This is command line tool. The graphical tools are: backintime-gnome and backintime-kde4. SYNOPSIS
backintime [ --backup | --backup-job | --snapshots-path | --snapshots-list | --snapshots-list-path | --last-snapshot | --last-snapshot-path | --help | --version | --license ] DESCRIPTION
Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux. The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of folders. All you have to do is configure: where to save snapshots, what folders to backup. You can also specify a backup schedule: disabled, every 5 minutes, every 10 minutes, every hour, every day, every week, every month. To configure it use one of the graphical interfaces available (backintime-gnome or backintime-kde4). It acts as a 'user mode' backup tool. This means that you can backup/restore only folders you have write access to (actually you can backup read-only folders, but you can't restore them). If you want to run it as root you need to use 'su'. A new snapshot is created only if something changed since the last snapshot (if any). A snapshot contains all the files from the selected folders (except for exclude patterns). In order to reduce disk space it use hard-links (if possible) between snapshots for unchanged files. This way a file of 10Mb, unchanged for 10 snapshots, will use only 10Mb on the disk. When you restore a file 'A', if it already exists on the file system it will be renamed to 'A.backup.currentdate'. For automatic backup it use 'cron' so there is no need for a daemon, but 'cron' must be running. user-callback During backup process the application can call a user callback at different steps. This callback is "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/backintime/user- callback" (by default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is ~/.config). The first argument is the progile id (1=Main Profile, ...). The second argument is the progile name. The third argument is the reason: 1 Backup process begins. 2 Backup process ends. 3 A new snapshot was taken. The extra arguments are snapshot ID and snapshot path. 4 There was an error. The second argument is the error code. Error codes: 1 The application is not configured. 2 A "take snapshot" process is already running. 3 Can't find snapshots folder (is it on a removable drive ?). 4 A snapshot for "now" already exist. OPTIONS
-b, --backup take a snapshot now (if needed) --backup-job take a snapshot (if needed) depending on schedule rules (used for cron jobs) --snapshots-path display path where is saves the snapshots (if configured) --snapshots-list display the list of snapshot IDs (if any) --snapshots-list-path display the paths to snapshots (if any) --last-snapshot display last snapshot ID (if any) --last-snapshot-path display the path to the last snapshot (if any) -h, --help display a short help -v, --version show version --license show license SEE ALSO
backintime-gnome, backintime-kde4. Back In Time also has a website: http://backintime.le-web.org AUTHOR
This manual page was written by BIT Team (<bit-team@lists.launchpad.net>). version 1.0.10 Mars 2009 backintime(1)
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