Unix Backup and Recovery

Chapter 4. Free Backup Utilities

Whether you have a small budget or no budget, there are many utilities that are available to help you automate your backups. This chapter provides an overview of the following utilities:

• hostdump.sh, a plug-and-play backup script

• infback.sh, an Informix backup utility

• oraback.sh, an Oracle backup utility

• syback.sh, a Sybase backup utility

• star, a very fast implementation of tar

• SysAudit, a system configuration backup utility

• SysInfo, another system configuration backup utility

• queso, a program to determine, via a LAN connection, the operating system type of a server

• nmap, another network probing tool with a lot of added functionality

Then, we discuss in detail one of the most popular free backup utilities, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, or AMANDA.

The hostdump.sh Utility

As discussed in Chapter 3, the hostdump.sh utility is a plug-and-play backup script that supports more than 20 versions of Unix. The main purpose of hostdump.sh is to get a “quick-and-dirty” backup of a system before doing anything else to it. To use it, simply make sure there’s a volume in the drive, then invoke hostname.sh with a device name and one or more hostnames, and it does the rest. The hostdump.sh utility backs up all the hosts that you list to the device that you specify. It automatically determines the names of all the filesystems, as well as their filesystem types. If it is a filesystem type that supports dump, it calls the appropriate command. If it is an unknown filesystem, or one that does not have a good dump command, it uses cpio. The hostdump.sh utility also puts two extra tar files on the volume. The first file is a header that lists all the filesystems on the volume and the commands that were used to back them up. After all backups are done, it then rereads the table of contents of each of the backups and places that information into a second tar file at the end of the volume. Detailed instructions on how to read the tar file at the end of the volume are also in the header file on the first partition. hostdump.sh is covered in detail in Chapter 3.