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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
- Path: sparky!uunet!charon.amdahl.com!pacbell.com!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!cserver!edsi!chuck
- From: chuck@edsi.plexus.COM (Chuck Tomasi)
- Subject: Re: HP-UX Backup Question
- Organization: Enterprise Data Systems Incorporated, Appleton WI
- Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 12:46:43 GMT
- Message-ID: <1992Nov19.124643.17935@edsi.plexus.COM>
- References: <1992Nov18.213351.3727@news2.cis.umn.edu>
- Lines: 57
-
- hangh@staff.tc.umn.edu (Tha^`y Cu*ng) writes:
-
- :)Now the question is IS FBACKUP, TAR, CPIO, ETC. AN OPTION IN MY
- :)CASE, IF IT IS, WHAT BACKUP SPEED WILL I GET OUT OF EACH OF THEM?.
- :)Thank you very much in advance, since I am using a friend account in
- :)order to post this, please respond either to the newsgroup or
- :)bnguyen@jeep.atk.com.
-
- A quick comment, then on with my answer. Please use word wrap. Your
- lines are way too long and can confuse the ____ out of some news
- readers. If you aren't sure how to employ word wrap on your current
- editor please ask your System Administrator. If you are or he doesn't
- know pose it to the net, but be sure to press return a little more
- often.
-
- I have been in a similar situation for quite some time, but I have been
- using a couple 8mm drives to do my dirty work. You can do backups via
- NFS, but it means a few things. First, cpio and tar are way too slow.
- I have about seven machines ranging from a couple hundred MB to 1 GB or
- more on them. The grand total of all my backups is still unknown. To
- backup my usual 180,000 via NFS using tar or cpio takes over 30 hours.
- Far too long for my tastes. The extended incrementals (or differential)
- would take about six hours each night. Still too long since these
- machines are used on all three shifts.
-
- Fbackup is what I am currently using and it seems to do a decent job.
- A full backup is taking almost seven hours and incrementals are just
- over an hour. I can live with that. If you go over NFS you must
- consider the fact that root needs access to all the systems he/she is
- backing up. This means you'll have to "punch a security hole" in the
- kernel so that root can modify file access times on other systems.
- Fbackup is also quick on the restore. In 10 minutes I can have any file
- off the tape. Such is not the case with tar or cpio on an 8mm unit.
-
- Omniback's drawback is the licensing mechanism IMHO. That is one of the
- main reasons I am investigating using Quick Restore for Unix by
- Workstation Solutions. I'm an old TBR user and know the people at WSI
- pretty well by this time. The installation of the product was simple
- enough, the commands aren't much different than tar, the tapes are tar
- compatible (for people who don't own QR), and it has some other nice
- networking features, but you only have to buy the software once and
- that's it. Go ahead and add and delete nodes at will. You don't have
- node licenses to worry about. That's important when the total number of
- workstations at our site is about 40-50!
-
- While my evaluation of the product is not complete I still need to
- determine if performance is going to beat that of fbackup. Restoring
- certainly will due to the fact that QR uses online index files and
- direct-to-block positioning of the tape.
-
- #include <hp/disclaimer.h>
- #include <ws/disclaimer.h>
- --
- Chuck Tomasi | "A munk a clone and a Ferengi
- chuck@edsi.plexus.COM | decide to go bowling together..."
- spool!cserver!edsi!chuck | -Data "The Outrageous Okana"
- ------<Enterprise Data Systems Incorporated, Appleton Wisconsin>------
-