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Administrator's Guide


Backing Up and Restoring Data Using Server-Free Data Movement

The following section briefly describes certain Tivoli Storage Manager client considerations that must be made to efficiently perform server-free data movement operations. The section also gives an overview of how to perform server-free data movement using the Tivoli Storage Manager client command-line interface.

Client Control Options

Before performing backup or restore operations using server-free data movement, there are certain control options you may have to specify in the client options file.

ENABLESERVERFREE
In order to perform server-free backup or restore operations, clients must specify the ENABLESERVERFREE command in their client options file:
enableserverfree yes

Destination Storage Pool
Server-free data movement uses a NONBLOCK data format. Unless the default destination storage pool is configured for server-free data movement, clients must bind a management class that contains the appropriate type of destination storage pool to those volumes that they wish to perform server-free data movement operations on. This can be done by specifying the following in the client options file, where SF1 is the name of the management class that has a backup copy group of data format NONBLOCK:
include.image k: sf1

To configure the default destination storage pool for server-free data movement, see Step 4. Configuring Tivoli Storage Manager for Server-Free Data Movement.For more information about the NONBLOCK data type, see Server-Free Data Movement. For more information about management classes, see Chapter 14, Implementing Policies for Client Data.

IMAGEGAPSIZE
During the backup of data, the data mover device should skip empty regions of the disk that do not contain data. The size of these empty regions can be specified by including the IMAGEGAPSIZE option in the client options file.

When you include this option, you are specifying the maximum size of a gap that will be backed up. For example, if a gap size of 10k is specified, the data mover device will skip all empty regions that are 10k in size and larger. All gap sizes of less than 10k will be backed up. If you wanted to specify a gap size of 64k in the options file, you would include the following:

include.image h: mymc imagegapsize=64k

To specify 64k in the command line you would issue the following:

-imagegapsize=64k

The default gap size for server-free image backup is 0.

If the gap size is configured too small, performance may decrease because the tape can no longer operate in streaming mode. However, because the client is not moving the data and cannot compress the data, skipping empty regions might be desired.

For more information about IMAGEGAPSIZE, see Backup-Archive Installation and User's Guide.

Performing Backups and Restores

After you have completed the steps in Configuring Tivoli Storage Manager for Server-Free Data Movement, and specified the items in Client Control Options, you are ready to perform server-free data movement operations. Use a client interface as described in Requirements to perform a logical volume image backup.

Full volume backups
Server-free data movement is supported for logical volume image backups. To perform a full image backup of logical volume K, you would enter the following:
dsmc backup image k:

By default, the image backup on Windows is online if the LVSA (Logical Volume Snapshot Agent) is available. For more information, refer to Backup-Archive Installation and User's Guide.

Full volume restore
To perform a full image restore of logical volume K, you would enter the following:
dsmc restore image k:

If you perform an incremental image backup or an incremental image restore, the operations will be file-level backups and restores on top of a regular image backup or restore, and will not use server-free data movement.

For more information on image backup and restore client operations, see the Backup-Archive Installation and User's Guide.


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