MAGSTAR Tape Lib 3750 and Tapeutil

[darcre]

I have recently taken over several AIX systems that have been badly neglected. My background is from the Linux/Solaris/Oracle side so when I saw this I said "YIKS!". Anyway, there are no filesystem backups in place, no tools such as SYSBAK, they are using tar to manually control and the mt command to manually control the library.

Tapeutil is installed and working, I have been able to accomplish an automated multi-tape backup using cpio and tapeutil, but this is only the oracle db and app directories. Two questions: 1) what should be backed up to ensure a viable system recovery (on the OS side) 2) Is there a way to determine what tapes in the library were being written to as part of a completed backup set.

Thanks for any assistance in advance.

 

[DSMARWAY]

hi ,

1. to backup the root volume group , you need to create a mksysb try smit screen ( smit mksysb) normally backup to DAT
but if you only have a magstar then if you create a mksysb on your magstar don't know if this will be bootable, probably you need to test it to confirm) but if you have a DAT drive ( lsdev -Cctape see if you get 4mm listed)

tapeutil is just a utility to control the loading / unloading of tapes and view what tapes are in which slot , its not a tape library software like tivoli, omniback or something similar

what you can do is use tape util to load a tape in a particular slot and then do your backup of filesystems and if that tape gets filled up then get tapeutil to load another tape in slot x , you will have to write a script to do this for example

in this case 3570 you have slot31( id 16) which is your tape drive
then have slots 32 - 50 where you can insert tapes , to load a tape in say slot 35 you have to move it to the tape drive 16 and then slot 35

e.g. tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 move 35 16
you then do your backup command be it cpio,backup , tar
in your script you can check how much space it has left and check if it needs more space then load another tape this time in slot 36

This way you control what gets wriiten to a tape in a particular slot .

I don't know how you use your magstar and tapeutil
but hopefully gives you a bit more of an idea.