Building on previous posts:
Standalone backup can be installed on the system drive, it gets
installed as [.SYSE] and is then started by:
>> B /R5=E0000000 DKA300
Any disks it needs to use must be ready before it goes looking for them
during initialisation.
The one off creation of the standalone backup kit (i.e. [.SYSE]) goes
something like:
$set def sys$update
$@stabackit
[Ref VMS System Manager's Manual]
Standalone backup has some limitations, e.g. at ~V5.5 it only supports a
cluster size of 1; i.e. it only supports disks up to 1 Gby. This means
that you can't use it with RZ27/28/29 StorageWorks (1/2/4/8/.. Gby)
disks.
On a machine with a SCSI bus and with spare scsi disks to hand my
preference would be to write the backup to another blank scsi disk as a
save set, and then to archive the backup on modern hardware. The save
set condenses the disk to it's minimal file size, and on restore you get
a "fresh" copy with contiguous files. The basic incantation is:
$init DKA200 volnam /nohigh
$backup/image/verify DKA300: DKA200:filename.sav/save
It's best practice to fix up any lint on the disk prior to backing up /
archiving it, i.e. to resolve any block allocation / file index
inconcistencies:
$analyse/disk DKA300: -- generates a list of issues
$analyse/disk/repair DKA300: -- lists and fixes any issues
$analyse/disk/read DKA300: -- reads all the blocks and tells you which
ones have irrecoverable parity errors
With three spindles on a system you can produce a compact copy of a disk
image, with the file index at the beginning rather than the centre of
the disk. One spindle runs the system and backup, another disk (which
could also be the system disk) has a saveset copy of the imaged disk on
it, the final disk will be initialised and have the saveset written to
it.
$initialise dkb000 /index=beginning/nohighwater
$mou/foreign dkb000:
$backup/image/verify/noinitialise dka200:filename.sav/save dkb000:
The reason for doing this used to be to produce the smallest possible
"necessary" disk image for burning on a CD or whatever. Nowadays, I
would probably copy the entire disk - GigaBytes are cheap, ensuring you
have copied to the HWM can be expensive. Obviously, a live disk volume
should have the file index in its default location at the centre of the
disk.
IIRC there are/were some (free) SalesWare utilities which permit
Files-11 disks to be mounted on XP and read. This would provide a much
neater (and safer) way of eliciting the .sav (save set) file for
archival on a PC than croping an image at it's high water mark.
However, dd of the entire disk containing the savesets may be even
better.
Regards
Martin