How to Use ufsdump to Perform Backups

You can perform full or incremental backups using the ufsdump command. This procedure backs up the zone /export/my-zone to /backup/my-zone.ufsdump, where my-zone is replaced with the name of a zone on your system. You might want to have a separate file system, for example, a file system mounted on /backup, to hold the backups.

1. Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.

   To create the role and assign the role to a user, see Using the Solaris Management Tools With RBAC (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

2. (Optional) Shut down the zone to put the zone in a quiescent state and to avoid creating backups of shared file systems.

   global# zlogin -S my-zone init 0

3. Check the zone's status.

   global# zoneadm list -cv

   You will see a display similar to the following:

   ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / native shared - my-zone installed /export/home/my-zone native shared

4. Perform the backup.

   global# ufsdump 0f /backup/my-zone.ufsdump /export/my-zone

   You will see a display similar to the following:

   DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed Aug 10 16:13:52 2005 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch DUMP: Dumping /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 (bird:/) to /backup/my-zone.ufsdump. DUMP: Mapping (Pass I) [regular files] DUMP: Mapping (Pass II) [directories] DUMP: Writing 63 Kilobyte records DUMP: Estimated 363468 blocks (174.47MB). DUMP: Dumping (Pass III) [directories] DUMP: Dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] DUMP: 369934 blocks (180.63MB) on 1 volume at 432 KB/sec DUMP: DUMP IS DONE

5. Boot the zone.

   global# zoneadm -z my-zone boot