BACKUP/3000 is the best backup utility on the market for MPE/iX systems.

• Zero-downtime online backup
• Faster store
• Data compression
• Multiple tape drive support
• Deferred backup
• Disk-to-disk backup
• Network backup
• DDS (DAT) backup
• Digital Linear Tape (DLT) support
• DBSTORE-compatible backup
• Data encryption
• Data integrity

Zero downtime online backup

Where as conventional backup utilities require exclusive access to files during the store, BACKUP's online backup capability allows users to continue working normally throughout the backup without having to log off, exit files, or change the way they work.
BACKUP's revolutionary zero downtime backup capability is perfect for high-availability systems and mission critical applications. Unlike all other so-called online backup solutions, BACKUP ensures complete data integrity by capturing all writes that occur during the backup and posting them on restore. This exclusive roll forward method results in a complete and accurate representation of the files as they appeared at the completion of the backup.

BACKUP's unique online backup technology is much more efficient than any other, consuming far less CPU and virtually no disk space. Many BACKUP customers say that overhead is so low, users do not even know a backup is running!

Fast store

BACKUP can cut the amount of time required for backup in half or more. Using sophisticated methods of reading data from disk and writing it to tape, and through parallel processing, BACKUP maximizes available system resources for backup.

BACKUP tunes itself based on system size and configuration and provides controls for fine-tuning resource utilization. Slow DDS and 8mm drives enjoy a large performance boost from BACKUP.

Data compression

Data compression reduces the amount of time and tape required for backup. BACKUP takes advantage of faster CPUs and provides selectable 2:1, 2.5:1, and 4:1 compression.

This typically results in a 50 to 80 percent reduction in tape usage.

Mutiple tape drive support

BACKUP can perform unattended backup by taking advantage of multiple backup devices, supporting various combinations of tape, cartridge, DDS, 8mm, DLT and optical disk drives.

BACKUP adds further support for multiple backup devices by allowing tape-to-tape copying of data from one backup device to another, such as tape to DAT or 8mm or DAT to DLT.

Deferred backup

Unattended backup can also be accomplished on any system configuration (single or multiple backup devices) by temporarily saving on disk the data that does not fit on a single tape.

Deferred backup capability is also useful for preventing a backup from hanging if the tape fills up and another tape is not yet mounted, such as when exceeding the capacity of a DAT or 8mm cartridge.

Disk to disk backup

BACKUP can also perform an unattended backup using disk as permanent or interim storage rather than temporary storage.

This further increases backup speed, since writing to and reading from disk is much faster than tape.

This disk-to-disk backup facility is especially useful for disposable backups, such as automatically backing up a database before changing capacities or program sources before making changes.

Disk-to-disk backup also makes it easy to create multiple copies of a backup, since a single backup can be done to disk and then copied to tape multiple times.

Network backup

BACKUP can perform unattended backup over a network in two ways.

• First, it can create disk-to-disk backup files to be sent over DS, NS, LAN, or other facility to another system. This allows the compressed backup of a local or remote computer to be transferred to another computer for storage on disk, or for copying to its backup device in store format.
• Second, BACKUP also supports the backup of one system's data to another systems backup device, providing additional flexibility in network backup.

DDS (DAT) backup

BACKUP greatly improves the performance and increases the capacity of DDS and 8mm , but also eliminates some of the weaknesses of DDS backups.

Using 4:1 data compression, BACKUP can quadruple the capacity of a DAT or 8mm tape. This, in effect, will enlarge the capacity of your backup media. Depending on the device used, you can store 16 Gigabytes or more on a single DDS tape. And with BACKUP you can also store to multiple drives in parallel with a single store, further enlarging the amount of data that can be stored.

Appended backup capability allows multiple backups to be written to a single DAT, permitting a tape to be loaded once during the week and have all that week's backups to be written to that tape.

A weakness of DDS backups is that they give a false sense of security. BACKUP fixes this in a number of ways: BACKUP can put a loaded DDS tape online, automatically REPLY to it and make sure a correct backup is performed, but then also automatically eject it to make sure it will not be overwritten. These features make it easy to automatically make safe and reliable backups.

Backup/3000 and DLT

Digital Linear Tape (DLT) technology has quickly become the preferred backup media in the Open Systems environment because DLT provides both the capacity and performance demanded by data-intensive applications and features a much longer drive life. The technology also offers the best error-detection and correction specifications in the industry.

DLT makes backups faster, safer, and more convenient, but only if the backup software supports DLT and its enhanced capabilities. BACKUP/3000 was the first advanced backup solution to support DLT drives on the HP3000, and is still one of the only ones that support FASTSEARCH and APPEND.

DBstore compatible Backup

Unlike DBSTORE, which requires a dedicated set of tapes for each database, BACKUP is capable of storing multiple IMAGE/SQL databases to a single tape set.

By updating the database root file and including all datasets in the backup, BACKUP maintains full compatibility with IMAGE/SQL transaction logging and recovery.

Data Encryption

BACKUP can safeguard data stored on tapes using data encryption. A choice of two data encryption algorithms is given: the industry-standard DES (Data Encryption Standard) algorithm and a faster, proprietary algorithm.

Data encryption is the ideal companion to DDS, which introduces significant security concerns, since the entire system backup can be carried out on a DAT in a user's shirt pocket.

Data Integrity

BACKUP contains facilities to ensure backup reliability, including integrity encoding and on-demand tape validation.

BACKUP additionally reports error and retry statistics on every tape, and allows acceptable tape error and retry thresholds to be preset to identify and reject bad tapes.

This is especially important for DDS drives, which do not report errors and retries on the front panel like other drives