HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

Identify excluded files with the -e option to the fbackup
command or with a graph file (described below)
Graph files Graph files are text files that contain a list of directories and files
to back up. If you use HP SMH to back up your system, HP
SMH creates the graph files for you (in /etc/sam/br) using
the included and excluded files. Graph files contain one entry
per line. Entries that begin with the character i indicate included
files; those that begin with the character e indicate excluded
files. For example:
i /home
e /home/deptD
The above file will cause all of the directory /home with the
exception of /home/deptD to be backed up.
You can identify a graph file with the -g option of the fbackup
command.
Determining How Often to Back Up Data
Evaluate the applications running on your system and the needs of your users to
determine how critical the data on your system is to them. Consider the following:
• How often do the contents of files change?
• How critical is it that files’ contents be up-to-date?
Full Backups vs. Incremental Backups
Once you have identified a list of files to include and exclude, decide whether you want
all of the files represented by your list to be backed up (a full backup) or only those
files that have changed or that have been created since the last time you backed up this
set of files (an incremental backup).
NOTE: A full backup does not mean a backup of every file on your system. It means
a backup of every file on your include list, regardless of when it was last backed up.
To ensure consistency, do not modify or use different graph files between full and
incremental backups
Backup Levels
A backup level is a level you define that identifies the different degrees of incremental
backups. Each backup level has a date associated with it that indicates when the last
backup at that level was created. You can have up to ten backup levels (0 through 9).
For example, level 0 is a full backup; level 1 backs up files that changed since the last
level 0 backup; level 2 backs up files that changed since the last level 1 backup, and so
on.
128 Managing Systems