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Old 06-14-2006, 10:46 AM   #1
chaddro
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mksysb backup to tape time, or STORIX better?


I have a P44-170 (333mhz) machines with DDS3 tape drive.

AIX: 5300-04

I am making a backup to take using mksysb.

Currently, this is taking about 90 minutes to backup. Is this typical? Is there a way to speed this up?

How do I check the size of the image on the tape? Would I do better making a bootable DVD?

Thanks for the help. Complete NOOB here when it comes to AIX and IBM RS/6000 systems. Would appreciate any comments concerning backups.

Would we be better served using STORIX?

Thanks.
 
Old 06-16-2006, 09:22 AM   #2
JurgyMan
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backup options

Storix probably won't be much faster than mksysb...
Mksysb will only backup rootvg; I assume that is all you have for VGs?
lsvg ; lsvg -l rootvg
To speed up mksysb, maybe there is some data that should be excluded (add to /etc/exclude.rootvg)

Or, playing with the compress yes/no may have an effect on the backups.

You really should be using the same DDS type tape as the drive to get fastest speeds.

DVD-RAM backups are _______SLOOOOOWWWWWW_______ DDS-3 should be much faster.

Another option, is to do mkdvd backups to an .iso images, that you xfer elsewhere, for burning if you actually _need_ to restore it...

JM
 
Old 06-19-2006, 06:59 AM   #3
chaddro
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JM,

Thank you for answering my post.

I bought this system off eBay ($500!), and it turns out that the person loaded all 8 (?) AIX 5.3 disks into a directory under rootvg. This appears to be a bit over a gig in size. So, as you suggested, I should include this directory in the exclude "/etc/exclude.rootvg" file.

I ran mksysb from tty login, and also the gui interface. GUI ran about 10 minutes longer. It didn't seem to make a difference if I turned compression on/off. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the mksysb script tells you how long the back up took. I suppose I could add a couple of lines to it to echo start and end times.

I currently have only 1 volume group, but will need to add another as I work to replace our current "server" (a 43p-150 with 256 ram) with this one. But that is for another post...!

One More question: What files can I delete from the tmp directory?

Thanks for the help.

CJ
 
Old 06-19-2006, 09:26 AM   #4
JurgyMan
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time and temp

Hiya,
you could just launch the mksysb on the command line like this:
time mksysb -i /dev/rmt0

to see how long it took... manpage mksysb for exclude file syntax.

what /tmp files can you remove? all of them, they're temporary!

actually, you could either turn on skulker in root cron
to regulary clean /tmp, or control it yourself with a nightly
cron similar to this:
# remove files older than 2 weeks nightly
0 0 * * * /bin/find /tmp -mtime +14 | xargs /bin/rm -ef > /var/adm/prune.log 2>&1
 
Old 06-19-2006, 10:42 AM   #5
chaddro
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JM

I excluded the install disk files and this time the mksysb only took about 40 min or so.

I was pretty sure all the tmp files could go, but not 100% sure.

Thanks again for the help.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 04:02 PM   #6
youareno6
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We use Storix and found that it does a better job than a plain mksysb. We used to use sysback until it was taken over my tsm. It's more like sysback instead of mksysb. As far as speed, with Storix, we can adjust the size of the data buffer to the tape drive and get really good performance. That is one advantage. You can tweek it to get better speed.
 
  


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