Sysback provides the flexibility of restoring onto the same system in
the exact same manner, or onto a completely different system with
differnet disk configuration, platform type, kernel, etc, while
reporting any inconsistencies and allowing you to adjust to fit. For
instance, you will get warnings if a particular volume group cannot be
created because the original disks to not exist, or that mirroring
cannot be accomplished because there is no longer enough disk space
because the disks are smaller. You can then select the disks for each
volume group, reduce or add space to filesystems and LVs, exclude
entire VGs or filesystems, etc.  You can even add and delete mirrors,
stripe or un-stripe logical volumes, etc.

In addition, all of the Sysback functions can be performed across the
network, including network boot and network install, and you can
perform striped backups across multipel tape drives, use sequential
tape autoloaders, and perform unattended multi-volume backups with
cron.

ON AIX 3.2, mksysb does not retain paging space config, disk LV
placement, mirroring, etc.

On AIX 4.1, it does these on an EXACT same configuration, but does not
allow any flexibility, and still does not retain non-rootvg volume
groups (although you can now use additional commands to backupa nd
restore these).  mksysb also does not allow you to clone onto
different platforms (i.e.  rspc -> rs6k -> rs6ksmp).

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.