Re: External backup/restore - an idea - comments please

> Is this what you are talking about: > onmode -c block> <get permanent copy of chunks in some way> > onmode -c unblock Basically, yes. I'd use dd, gzip and netcat for dumping all chunks (all of them in raw devices) to filesystem on a remote host. > The onmode -c puts all of the chunks into a consistent state and the > block keeps them there until you give it the unblock command. During > the blocked time you can copy every chunk to a file, or tape. If you > have drives that have a double mirroring scheme you can break one of > the mirrors for each drive and unblock the server and then backup the Yes, I've read about the mirroring, but in this stage I don't consider it. I'd have to do it manually, or spend years for writing a script to do it. My idea was to launch a cron script early in the morning, between 3am and 4am when there's almost no one connected. > I don't think that you need to do anything with the current and > previous logs. This is because these have been applied to the dbspaces > that you have just backed up. This is exactly what I needed confirmation for. Martin also suggested it in his reply and it perfectly suits me. It's because documentation states that logical logs are mandatory for successful external restore. It seems that I forgot that logs are not only backed up but also reside on the disk (from which they get backed up) :-) > Now this doesn't solve point in time backups using the logs. You can Well, at the moment I'm not concerned about point-in-time restores. They fork fine when using onbar and storage manager that does backups is available (I tested it, although just on trivial set of data). I'm thinking about external backups/restores because few days ago I was frightened with strange backup verification results. "Onbar -v" aka archecker wasn't able to verifiy neither of many backups in the last month. So we thought something must be wrong with our backup tape library and/or storage manager. But, when we restored from the last backup taken (it was whole system backup) everything was fine, all onchecks I ran were successful. > I wonder now if you have backed > up your logs with ontape can you do an onbar physical restore and then > an ontape logical restore? If so then do an onbar -r -p -e ... then > apply the logs that you need using the ontape -l command. It seems like > you can but I don't actually know. For all I know this can't be done because onbar and ontape internals are different and you can't backup storage spaces with onbar and logical logs with ontape and have a decent restore with that. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, please.