Recently I upgraded a client’s Vista computer (Toshiba Qosmio, 4Gb, Intel Core Duo P7350, 7200-RPM 200-Gb disk) from Vista Ultimate 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Being a Unix sysadmin this is not something I usually do. How did the experience compare to upgrading HP-UX, Solaris or SLES? In a nutshell: I’d rather walk around all day in wet underwear than attempt to upgrade Vista ever again.

NetBackup is an enterprise-level distributed backup and recovery application. The environment consists of the master server, media server, storage library, networking hardware, and client agents. NetBackup supports a wide variety of Unix, Linux, VMS, and Windows systems. The original backup solution was developed by Control Data Corp., later acquired by Openvision, which gave the product its “NetBackup” name. NetBackup was then bought by Veritas and is currently owned and supported (poorly) by Symantec.

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

The following Korn shell script will make a bootable copy of the boot disk on a Solaris system. The script uses dd and requires that the source disk and destination disk have the same geometry.

#!/bin/ksh
 
#### …

The following is a brief overview of standard Unix comman-line utilities used for data backup on Solaris systems. Most of the information below is also applicable to other unixoid systems.
Common backup/copy methods:
tar | gzip
Basic syntax …

The following two commands will take all data in /home/neal, copy it to the ISO file, and burn the ISO file to a recordable CD.

mkisofs -l -L -r -o /local/mycdromfile2.iso /home/neal
cdrecord -v /local/mycdromfile2.iso

The resulting …

This script uses the output of the script in the previous example to calculate yearly backup load for each Veritas NetBackup client.

#!/bin/ksh
 
WORKDIR=/var/adm/bin/bpstat
BACKUPS=$WORKDIR/backups
STATDIR=$WORKDIR/stats
PROCESS=1
gzip="/usr/local/bin/gzip"
 
if [ ! -d $WORKDIR ] || [ ! -d $BACKUPS ] || [ …

The following script will calculate total size of data backups for each Veritas NetBackup client over the past week (or as defined by the “daysago” variable in the script). The final output will be uploaded …

In the following example we need to make sure that /export/home on server host2 looks exactly like /export/home on host1. Thus, our SOURCE is host1:/export/home and our TARGET is host2:/export/home
There are two ways of using …

In this example we use the tar command to copy the contents of the /export/home directory to /temphome. This particular syntax forgoes the creation of an actual tarball file. This can be useful if you …

enable “Rename hard links”
disable “Rename soft links”
if root of destination drive is mounted as /destination/ then select “Restore to alternate path: from / to /destination/ , Restore search path
This is the alternate path for everything: …

The Unix tar command creates an archive of files and directories while preserving directory structure, file permissions and ownership information. This command is ideally suited for creating backups of most types of data. Many open-source …

In our example we were requested to archive a 741 mb directory to CD. The source data resided on a Unix data server.
1. we copied the source data to a …

find /full_source_path -depth -print | cpio -pudm /full_target_path
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tar cvf – . | gzip > target.tar.gz
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1) rsync needs to be installed on source and destination nodes
2) both nodes need to be each other’s /etc/hosts
3) rsync needs to be in the basic PATH for default user’s (root’s shell); create a soft …