I'm looking for a program or some way to backup my server to another location onto another server. Does anyone have any ideas? What utility, server O/S(I would like to use Linux RH or CentOS)?
Whats the best way to do this?
I am fairly new with Unix.
There can be many solutions. which OS are the servers on?
The server that needs backed up is on UNIX-AIX 6. I would like to use a linux distro for the destination server, CentOS or Fedora. Eventually might go to RedHat.
Which sort of backup should it be? AIX offers a so-called "mksysb", which backs up the rootvg. This results in a system backup with all the systems relevant data saved (users, groups, passwords, mountpoints, printqueues, interfaces and the like), but not (if the system is set up correctly) the data or the applications. Basically the mksysb issues a "savevg rootvg" and adds some additional logic to that so that the resulting file could be booted from if it is written to a bootable medium.
If you want to back up the remainder of your system you should set apart the static parts (say, the applications executables) and the volatile parts of your data (database files for instance) and develop different backup strategies for these.
Another point is the size of the backup and the timeframe you have for taking the backup: local disks as destination are faster than network and you can transfer the backup file(s) over the network later. Still you have to have enough diskspace to do that. Taking the backup directly over the network is slower, but doesn't require the extra disk space. On the other hand taking backups over the network might put some strain on the network hardware and/or the destination host. Maybe there are some other hosts sending their backups over the network too and the compete for the network bandwith and the I/O bandwidth of the backup server - in this case you need a schedule so that only one server is backing up at any given time.
Tell us more about your environment and your requirements and we might be able to help you better instead of telling you some commonplaces about backups.
Regarding software: i would stick with something as simple as possible: tar, maybe rsync, ftp, scp and something such.
I have a Unix-AIX server that hosts our ERP system. A full backup of the /u2 directory which is a Universe Database is scheduled every night on tape, I also do a mksysb every month on tape manually. What i need to do is backup or put a backup file of the Universe Database onto a server at my other location everyday. The backup could be ran at night and then transfered to the server in the other location, i believe i have the diskspace or it could be done over the network at night as mentioned by Bakunin. There is only roughly 20GB of data being backed up.
I would like to try using rsync, however i have no experience with it at all. I know it's not installed on my server so i would need help getting it installed. I have mostly worked with linux and am a little unsure on how to install programs in unix. It would all have to be done via command line as that is how my system is setup.
I have a WAN setup between locations so it should be easy to get the data there.
Let me know what other info you might need.
thanks for the help.
Last edited by ITAdmin08; 09-10-2009 at 03:23 PM..
There are two different problems, lets discuss it one by one:
I suppose the data reside on some sort of SAN device. To read and write 20GB of data is a matter of some minutes, maybe a quarter hour (if things go really wrong). We can afford to have the backup reside on the local machine.
We need a script, which does the following:
- stop the application
- tar (and gzip?) the data to the (local) backup destination
- start up the application again
The script should issue some sort of alert (alerting a management system like Patrol/HP-Openview/etc. or mail to root or whatever) if anything goes wrong.
Then lets turn our attention to the backup server. We need a script there which does the following:
- contact the server to be backed up.
- pull the file the server has already created that day
- delete old backups on the system if we want to have only a certain number of generations online
Again, if anything goes wrong the system should complain somehow.
It is good to have the taking and the pulling over of the backup NOT tied together (that would have been possible) because this way you can take the backup when the client has time and then pull over the backup when the backup system has time.
Both these scripts will be put into crontab to run daily (or whatever timely pattern you want them to run).
Lets start with the scripts. Since i don't know your exact environment these scripts are a sketch of course. You will have to fill in the details yourself:
Note that this is really a sketch: for instance there is no provision to delete old backup files when they are no longer necessary. Ideally the script for the backup server should do this after pulling over the file successfully. Still it would probably be nice to have the last backup generation on the originating server in case we have to restore something, so there is room for some scripting for you.
Lets turn to the matter of software installation: You find a pinned thread with important URLs at the top of this forum. Among these URLs is IBMs "Linux toolbox for AIX", where you can download all the necessary tools already packaged in rpm-format.
You first have to install the rpm installer itself, which is a package in AIX' native bff-format. (AIX has its own packaging format.)
To install packages in bff-format:
- copy the downloaded packages to a directory
- change to this directory and issue "inutoc .", which will create a file ".toc"
- issue "installp -ac -d. -Y -g <package_name>" to install a package
To install packages in rpm-format:
- copy the downloaded packages to a directory
- change to this directory
- issue "rpm -i <packagefile>" to install to package
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