For now, the best you could hope for would be an image mode snapshot backup going into a deduplicated storage pool.
Alternatively, if your application has a TSM connect agent (such as TDP for Databases), then you could use that to get the application data incrementally rather than pulling the blocks. Otherwise, if you have a home-made application, it shouldn't be hard to write an incremental image backup tool. Use OS and/or Array commands to: * Quiesce the filesystem * Lock writes * snapshot * resume r/w * present the snapshot devices Then, using the code from adsmpipe, hash procedures, and standard file I/O: * Try to pull an existing hash table out of TSM. Backup 0 would have none. * Tead in the snapshot raw logical volume and generate hashes for every block. * For any block without a hash, write out in binary format the sector offset, number of blocks, and then the raw data * Once the whole "image" is written, then you can save the hash table as a second file. * If you wanted to be fancy, you could index by hash and gain some manner of block-level dedupe. Finally, you'd destroy the filesystem snapshot if necessary. Hash code and file I/O code are readily available on the internet. adsmpipe can also be found on the internet. I would recommend static linking if your UNIX of choice prefers it. On Linux, ADSMPIPE is very sensitive to libc changes. As for something like FastBack Mounter, you'd need to write a block level device driver, which is more complicated. ________________________________ From: Mehdi Salehi <iranian.aix.supp...@gmail.com> To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Sent: Sat, January 23, 2010 1:34:40 AM Subject: [ADSM-L] sector-based incremental backup of filesystem Hi, Is there any way for sector-based incremental image backup in Unix systems? B/A client helps incremental-by-date, but it is inefficient for some applications. What I am looking for is a feature like what FastBack or UltraBac present for Windows. Thanks