having a brain fart
What's the best tool to acquire an image of an AIX drive that can't be shut down… so it needs to be an image of the live system ( I know not ideal… )?
dd works in AIX as far as I remember, at least it does in v6.
Are the disks in a RAID mirror?
Maybe you can break the RAID set and dd the offline drive.
Doing a plain dd on a live system with writes throughout the imaging process going to would surely result in a somewhat corrupted result.
Have a look at f response they have an AIX client.
Awesome piece of software btw.
I have used dd successfully, on live *nix boxes.
It very much depends on the target system's use.
dd would provide a snapshot in time of a moving target, so "corrupted result" is moot. Theoretically maybe, but technically one could never get a matching image again of the same system, no matter of the solution. Note that I am writing here about low level, sector-by-sector, no file system duplication.
Agreed, the files can be inconsistent and in a transient state - which in turn may make them unreadable from OS level.
If imaging is necessary, that is unallocated space must be collected and drive read at low level, dd will do the job. Maybe remounting partitions read-only is a possibility to avoid inconsistencies in the files.
If it is just files, try rsync.
[…]Doing a plain dd on a live system with writes throughout the imaging process going to would surely result in a somewhat corrupted result.