From your local workstation, you can back up a logical volume as a single object (image backup) on your system.
The traditional static image backup prevents write access to the volume by other system applications during the operation.
You must be a root user to perform this task, and image backup does not apply to Mac OS X.
These volumes can be formatted NTFS or ReFS, or unformatted RAW volumes. If a volume is NTFS-formatted, only those blocks that are used by the file system or smaller than the imagegapsize parameter are backed up.
Normally you cannot restore an image backup of the system drive over itself since an exclusive lock of the system drive is not possible. However, in a Windows pre-installation environment (WinPE), an image restore of the system drive is possible. For information about restoring data in a WinPE environment, see Tivoli Storage Manager Recovery Techniques Using Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), which is available on the web at http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27005028.
You cannot restore an image backup to the volume on which the client is running. Consider installing the Tivoli® Storage Manager client on the system drive.
Image backup does not guarantee consistency of system objects, such as the Active Directory. System objects can be spread out across multiple volumes, and should be backed up by using the backup systemstate command.
An image backup provides the following benefits:
The traditional static image backup prevents write access to the volume by other system applications during the operation. Use the dynamicimage option to back up the volume as is, without remounting it read-only. Corruption of the backup can occur if applications continue to write to the volume while the backup is running. Writing to a volume while an image backup is running can result in inconsistent data and data loss after a restore operation is run. The dynamicimage option overrides the copy serialization value in the management class to perform an image backup. After restoring an image backup taken with the dynamicimage option, always run the chkdsk utility.
The traditional offline image backup prevents write access to the volume by other system applications during the operation. When you backup an image by using snapshotproviderimage=none, always run the fsck utility after you restore the data.
To restore an image backup of a volume, the Tivoli Storage Manager client must be able to obtain an exclusive lock on the volume that is being restored.
If the Tivoli Storage Manager client fails to mount the file system after it restores an image, run fsck. However, running fsck can affect the integrity of large amounts of data. Do not use dynamic image backup for AIX® JFS2 file systems. The Tivoli Storage Manager client does not allow dynamic image backup for AIX JFS2 file systems. If you specify dynamicimage=yes for a JFS2 file system, the Tivoli Storage Manager client performs a snapshot-based image backup. If the snapshot cannot be created for some reason, the Tivoli Storage Manager client instead performs a static image backup.
For AIX JFS2 file systems, the amount of data that is backed up to the Tivoli Storage Manager server during static or snapshot image backup is reduced by backing up only those blocks used by the file system or smaller than the imagegapsize option. This method of backing up your data improves the performance of image backup. For more information, see Imagegapsize.
For AIX clients only: By default, Tivoli Storage Manager performs an online snapshot image backup of JFS2 file systems, during which the volume is available to other system applications.
For Linux clients only: By default, Tivoli Storage Manager performs a snapshot image backup of file systems that exist on a logical volume that is created by the Linux Logical Volume Manager. The volume is available to other system applications while the snapshot image backup is performed.
If the Tivoli Storage Manager online image support is configured, Tivoli Storage Manager performs an online image backup, during which the volume is available to other system applications. The snapshot provider, as specified by the snapshotproviderimage option, maintains a consistent image of a volume during online image backup.
You can use the snapshotproviderimage option with the backup image command or the include.image option to specify whether to perform an offline or online image backup.