Unix Backup and Recovery

Recovering a SunOS/Solaris System

Neither SunOS nor Solaris has a bare-metal recovery utility like the other operating systems covered in this book. However, the existence of dump, restore, and installboot make doing a bare-metal recovery relatively simple. The individual steps and the logic behind them were covered earlier. Following is an example of how such a recovery would look on a Solaris system. This example covers a Sparc 20. Its operating system is Solaris 2.6, and it has two filesystems, / and /var.

Preparing for Disaster

First, we will back up the system using hostdump.sh . This utility is covered in Chapter 3, and will use ufsdump to back up the / and /var filesystems.

On the system that I used for this example, the / and /var filesystems contained the entire operating system. Your system may be different, so you may need to back up other filesystems such a /usr, /opt, /usr/openwin, etc.

The command to do this and its results are displayed in Example 7-1.

Example 7-1. The hostdump.sh Output

# /usr/local/bin/hostdump.sh 0 /dev/rmt/0n /tmp/backup.log curtis:/ curtis:/var ========================================================== Beginning level 0 backup of the following clients: curtis:/ curtis:/var This backup is going to curtis:/dev/rmt/0n and is being logged to curtis:/tmp/backup.log ========================================================== Querying clients to determine which filesystems to back up... Including "curtis:/:ufs:sparc-sun-solaris2.6" in backup include list. ...