NEWBIE - backups over 2Gig

[insl]

Warning - new to HPUX. Trying to backup over 2 gigs of data to an NFS mount on a win2K server. The NFS mount and communications are great, and as long as I keep the destination file under 2Gig then life is great. However, if I top the 2Gig limitation, then I can't read the backup file. The syntax being used is "tar -cpvf - SOURCE |gzip >/DESTINATION.tar". This command works as long as the detination file is not larger than 2Gig.

We've also tried to redirect the tar output to a file with "tar -cpvf - SOURCEFILE >DESTINATION.tar" and then attempt to read the larger_than 2gig file with "cat SOURCE.tar | tar xvpf - DESTINATION".

 

[mewa]

Hi,
I think the commands like tar, cpio, pax do not support largefiles (>2GB). You have to use fbackup or get gnu tar at

http://hpux.asknet.de/hppd/hpux/Gnu.

mewa

 

[iaguy]

Fred Mallet wrote an article for HP about how tar has "some issues" Like if you get out of sync, the untarring process just stops and you lose all the data. His comment was that tar was just fine for data the was not considered critical. But then if the data was not critical, why would you back it up?

I have always used cpio for backups. I certainly exceeded the 2GB backup limit, but no one file was that large. I'm not sure what you are backing up to. Another Disk??? I used tape. Perhaps today the disk is cheaper than the tape. In that case, compressing the files and rcp'ing them might be as fast and retain file structure. You might also investigate the exec command. There are a lot of commands that have file size or file number limits. The exec command helps offset some of the limitations.

 

[KenCunningham]

Does HP have ufsdump or equivalent? I've never had a problem with that (hostage to fortune there!).

 

[bi]

You can back to a local tape drive using fbackup and frestore or use sam's backup tool (which uses fbackup and frestore, I believe). The tool is pretty good, but trying to do a restore can be take a while. But it does keep track of what has been backed up.