[SunHELP] Help with backup (was: using dd)

[William W. Arnold]

Edward Chase writes ---
>(c0t11s0) is partitioned the same way.  My first thought was to mirror the 
>two 17GB partitions, but I can't because Solstice Disk Suite won't mirror 
>the / partition.

It mirrors mine with no problem...
[~]% df /
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0         5567262   2279927   3231663  41% /

[~]% metastat d0
d0: Mirror
    Submirror 0: d10
      State: Okay         
    Submirror 1: d20
      State: Okay         
    Pass: 1
    Read option: roundrobin (default)
    Write option: parallel (default)
    Size: 11308800 blocks
[cut]

Note that it won't boot by itself if the original root disk goes bad,
but that's just a matter of telling it to boot from the second.

>Then I would backup the second drive and the array (after shutting 
>down the Oracle server and it's related other processes) to tape.  Once the 
>tape backup was finished, I'd have the Oracle server and it's related 
>processes start back up again.  This should all be done via a cron'd script.
>
>Right now I'm not sure if this is the best way to go.  My dd command is now 
>at the 2 hour mark.
>
>Any suggestions on how do deal with these backups?

1) mirror using SDS
2) for backup, shutdown Oracle, and anything else doing much write activity.
3) flush filesystem, lockfs filesystem, break mirror, unlockfs filesystem
4) bring oracle back up, etc.
5) backup broken mirror
6) reattach mirror.

This is explained in one the SDS answerbook with more details.

-- 
-billy-  warnold at vipnet.org
Senior Systems Administrator
Virginia Interactive