> Wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with testing and using
> ADSM as the backup/restore utility on a Sun box?
>
> I have a user saying they want to archive the filespaces -- delete them,
> restore for Y2K testing -- they want estimate on effort, etc.
> Anyone else out there done this before?  Any input would be appreciated.....

I have restored the entire system disk of Sun workstation from ADSM
incremental backups and it does work.  Took a long time with all the
tape mounts, but it did work.


The hardest part was getting the ADSM client installed and running
when booted from CDROM.

It was not that hard, just tricky.  Set IP address and HOSTNAME of the
system, get the ADSM package onto the machine, use pkgtrans to unpack
it, fiddle the options file and various enviroment variables to make
it run.  Then newfs the system disk and "dsmc restore / /a/ -su=yes".


If you have enough physical disks, you can use the running system and
installed ADSM client to restore to a new disk.  Then physically swap
disks.  Then again, if you have enough disks to do that, you might as
well do "ufsdump ... | ufsrestore" ;)


One gotcha is that ADSM does not restore the directories used as mount
points.  You need to manually create:

        /proc
        /dev/fd

and any other directories that file systems are mounted over.  The
system struggles on without those two.  For others, the file systems
will not mount.

Oh yes ... and run "installboot ..." to make the system disk bootable.


For data disks it is a lot easier. And quicker if you do a full backup
before hand to get all the data contiguous on the tapes.  Registering
a second nodename helps so the selective backup does not take up a
version against your retention policies.  Reviewing an excludes so you
don't accidently not back something up that really was vital.  Look
both ways when crossing the street to get coffee.

Russell