UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Thank you very much for your help guys.
Any other ideas will be appreciated.

1) Yeah ufsdump will get all the files and subdirectories of /var provided that they are all in the same filesystem. If you create a separate mounted volume called /var/adm, well now you have to dump that separately. When you back up root, you get all of /bin and /lib, and so on. But you you still need /usr and /var as separate runs.

2) Yeah, you would need a rewind if you go to the restore immediately after the backup. Usually the restore comes long after the tape has been removed from the drive.

3) Yeah, the -i will let you pick and choose...a very cool feature.

"When you back up root, you get all of /bin and /lib, and so on. But you you still need /usr and /var as separate runs."

Why do I have to do that?

I thought you said that ufsdump takes a snapshot of the sub-directories as well ( on the same file system)

Here is the output of the df -k

<pre>
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 1987399 935141 992637 49% /
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 962571 667662 237155 74% /var
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s4 962571 675981 228836 75% /home
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5 3009327 2065125 884016 71% /u01
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 3009327 2262450 686691 77% /u02
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1 3009327 2318909 630232 79% /u03
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s3 3009327 2938883 10258 100% /u04
swap 2811408 3296 2808112 1% /tmp
</pre>

Thanks again

We better go back a review filesystems here. When most kernels boot they initialize the system by automatically mounting root and they fire up init and a few other processes. At this point, the only thing mounted is root:
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 1987399 935141 992637 49% /
If you are going into single user mode, it stops here and that is all you see. If you examined /var or /usr you would only have empty directiores since they are not yet mounted. All of the subdirecties and files that we do see are on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.

But we have another disk device called c0t0d0s3 which we can now mount on /var. Once we do that we suddenly see /var/spool spring into existence. But /var/spool is on c0t0d0s3 while /etc/mail is on c0t0d0s0. They may seem to equally situated in some respects, but the difference is important.

Most people also will have a separate /usr filesystem. Looking again, I see that you don't. So I misspoke earlier when I said that you also needed /usr. In your case, you don't. You could possibly configure your system to only have one very large root filesystem...if you did, one ufsdump would do it all.

When you tell ufsdump to save a copy of c0t0d0s0, that is what it does. Sure it will pick up the /var empty directory that root uses as a mount point, but nothing under /var will be there. That's why we need another run of ufsdump to also save a copy of c0t0d0s3.

The 'kernel' and 'init' issues was a good lesson, things that already new. I appreciate the correction though, now everything is clear. You really confused me when you said that I had to backup /usr as well, beacause I have already gave my file systems (partitions)above.
The reason that I didn't use one large file system is only for reduntancy.
Thank you very much for your help.

Aris :=)