Solstice Backup 5.1 Administration Guide

How to Create Client/Save Set Combinations

  1. Create a client in the Clients resource that specifies a portion of the client's data, for example, a single filesystem, in the Save Set attribute.

  2. Create another client in the Clients resource that uses the same client hostname but specifies a different portion of the client's data in the Save Set attribute.

    If you specify more than one save set, enter each save set on a separate line.

  3. Associate each client/save set instance with a different backup group to vary the start time of the backups.

  4. Associate each client/save set instance with a different schedule to specify that each client/save set instance runs its full backup on a different day of the week.

    You can associate the same save set with more than one client instance, so it can be associated with more than one group or schedule for backup.

    If the default keyword "All" appears in the Save Set attribute in the Clients resource, all local filesystems for the client machine are backed up according to the group and schedule listed in the Clients resource.

    When you configure multiple client resources for the same machine, the most conservative of the assigned browse and retention policies is automatically implemented for all of them.


    Caution - Caution -

    The core file is not backed up unless you specify it in the Save Set attribute of the Clients resource.


Logical Volume Backup

A logical volume is a type of primary (disk) storage on a client machine that can span several physical disk volumes. The logical volume has its own device address, and it is treated similarly to a disk partition by the filesystem. When Backup backs up data from clients, it has to determine how many save sessions to allocate to each client for best performance. To avoid contention, there should not be more than one backup operation running per physical disk. Backup attempts to allocate different sessions across different physical disks to avoid contention.

To determine how many save sessions to allocate, the Backup server probes (queries) the clients in a backup group (using the savefs -p command) to find out what data to back up and where the data is physically located. Backup tries to determine whether there are logical volumes. It stores this information in two variables, disk-number and maximum-sessions, according to the following rules:

The server uses the output from the savefs probe to allocate its save sessions (up to the maximum server parallelism) across the clients in the backup group:

  1. First, the server allocates one save session per client in the backup group.

  2. Then, if there are still save sessions available, it allocates one save session per physical disk on each client.

  3. If, after that, there are still save sessions available, it allocates save sessions to each disk-number value, up to the limits in maximum-sessions for each client and client parallelism.