AIX's backup and restore Utilities
Bill Moraca Introduction Devising a backup strategy that balances the needs of different user communities, staff availability, and system recoverability is not easy, but it is one of the most important responsibilities of the system administrator. Finding and using the right tools can simplify the task and help ensure the robustness of the system. This article reviews the AIX backup and restore commands and presents a set of scripts based on those commands. Most other UNIX systems support commands that work the same as the AIX commands described here, but the command name and/or switch syntax may vary. The AIX backup Command Although the AIX operating system supports a number of commands for saving and restoring directory files to tape, including tar and cpio, the backup and restore utilities offer the greatest flexibility and control. The backup command makes it easy to perform incremental backups (i.e., to copy files created/modified since some past date), and to include and exclude files. These capabilities can affect both the number of tapes required for backups over the retention period and the time required to actually perform the backups. The backup command supports filesystem backups (by inode) in addition to regular file and directory backups (by name). Backups by inode are issued for a single filesystem and are always incremental based on the level parameter, an integer in the range 0-9. The value 0 specifies that the entire filesystem is copied. For any other level i, files modified since the most recent level i-1 (or lower) backup are copied. backup writes an eof mark at the end of each fileset, so multiple filesystems can be written to a single tape when a non-rewinding device is specified. If an error occurs on a tape during a restore operation, data from the other filesystems can still be recovered. backup can read from unmounted filesystems, which makes it possible to ensure that files are not modified while the backup is in progress. The backup command to do a level 0 of the /home filesystem is:
backup -0 -f /dev/rmt0 -u /home
restore commands will be covered later, in the script discussion. Recognizing usefulness of backup and restore, one of my customers had me develop shell scripts with those commands to automate backup and restore operations. The rest of this article describes those scripts. Tape Format As stated earlier, backup by inode is filesystem based. This means that a backup command must be issued for each filesystem to be written to tape. Each command creates a new backup set on the tape. Use of a non-rewinding tape device allows multiple backup sets to be written to a single tape. Within a backup set, the filenames are relative paths beneath the mount point. For example, the .profile file for user billm under filesystem /home would appear on the tape as ./billm/.profile. If there is more than one backup set on a single tape, the sequence of the filesystems on the tape must be preserved independently of the filesystems themselves, since the mount point (e.g., /home) is not part of the filename on the tape. One solution is to use tar to write a header file at the front of the tape. The header file would contain the date, hostname, and the list of filesystems in the order they were backed up. It could be read with tar to determine the order in which filesystems were written to the tape. Following is a sample header file for a system with hostname "earth."
earth Tue Aug 23 23:30:05 EST 1994 This is a level 0 backup. 1 / 2 /usr 3 /var 4 /home 5 /userfilesys1 6 /userfilesys2
The scripts described here use a header file named /tmp/!backuplist. The filesystems are backed up in sequence after the tar file. Backup Script The backup script (backup.scr) is in Listing 1. The script has two parameters. The first is the level of the backup to be done (0-9); the second is an optional tape device specification. If the tape device is not specified, the script uses the value /dev/rmt0.1. The checkparm function makes a lot of checks to allow a variety of specifications for the tape drive and to enforce the non-rewind requirement. If the device is an 8mm tape the set_blocksize and reset_blocksize functions are used to ensure that the blocksize is set to 1024, the customer's preferred value. The same logic for checking the tape drive parameter, implementing a default tape device, and setting the blocksize appears in the restore scripts. The site has a number of RS/6000 systems, each with unique filesystems. The script uses the lsfs (list filesystems) command to construct the list of filesystems to backup. Using the -v switch on lsfs makes it easy to exclude nfs and cdrom filesystems. Certain jfs filesystems, such as /mnt and /blv, should also be excluded. The complete ksh command to create the filesystem list is:
filesys=`lsfs -c -v jfs | tail +2 | \ grep -v -E "^/mnt:|^/blv:|^/tmp:"`
If you want to backup /tmp or exclude /usr, just edit the -E switch on the grep command. The same grep parameter can be changed to exclude other filesystems from the backup. Function make_header uses the variable filesys to construct the header file and write it to tape. Function doback is then invoked once for each filesystem in the variable filesys to write the filesystem backup to tape. Listing the Contents of a Backup Set Listing backup sets from tape is a two-step operation. First, the header file is queried to determine the number of the backup set from which to list files. Second, a restore command is used to list the files in the selected backup set. The commands to read the header file from rmt0 (see Listing 2, gethdr.scr) are:
tctl -f /dev/rmt0 rewind tar -xf /dev/rmt0.1 /tmp/!backuplist
The file /tmp/!backuplist is interrogated to determine the sequence number for /home. In the list fileset command which follows, /home is assumed to be the fourth fileset:
tctl -f /dev/rmt0 rewind tctl -f /dev/rmt0.1 fsf 1 restore -tqvf /dev/rmt0.1 -s4
The tctl command is used to rewind the tape and skip over the header file. The -q parameter on the restore command specifies that the tape is already positioned at the start of the backup sets. listfile.scr (Listing 3) implements these commands with appropriate parameter checking and error handling. Restoring All Files from a Fileset The commands to restore all files for filesystem /home (assuming /home is the fourth fileset on the tape) are:
cd /home tctl -f /dev/rmt0 rewind tctl -f /dev/rmt0.1 fsf 1 restore -rqvf /dev/rmt0.1 -s4
Note that files are restored to the current directory. This makes it possible to restore to a temporary directory (e.g., /tmp) and then move files to the correct location after inspection. If multiple levels of the backup are used, for example, level 0 on Saturday and level 1 on Monday through Friday, then the level 0 tape should be restored followed by the most recent level 1. getfsys.scr (Listing 4) implements these commands with appropriate parameter checking and error handling. Restoring One or More Files from a Fileset The commands to restore the f1 and f2 files for user billm in filesystem /home (assuming /home is the fourth fileset on the tape) are:
cd /home tctl -f /dev/rmt0 rewind tctl -f /dev/rmt0.1 fsf 1 restore -qvf /dev/rmt0.1 -s4 \ -x "./billm/f1 ./billm/f2"
To restore all the files for user /billm, the -x switch would be -x ./billm. getfiles.scr (Listing 5) implements these commands with appropriate parameter checking and error handling. Final Notes backup and restore are specific to AIX, but other UNIX systems implement commands that write a tape in the same format as the AIX backup command. The names and switch syntax vary. Sun (Berkeley) systems support the dump command and system V.4 has ufsbackup. For the sake of robust backups, it would be worth your while to become familiar with your system's implementation.
About the Author
Bill Moraca is an IBM I/T Specialist on the AIX RS/6000 system. He has helped many customers deal with RS/6000 system administration issues such as backup/restore, availability, and customized interfaces. You can contact Bill via email as wmoraca@wasvmic1.vnet.ibm.com.
|