[rescue] Backups

[Phil Stracchino]

Jeffrey Nonken wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:09:21 -0500 (CDT), Mike Hebel wrote:
>>But if DVDs will work for your amount of data then fine.  I think
>>you'll have trouble implementing that on a 'nix system though.
>>Someone mentioned  using cdrecord but I'm pretty sure that doesn't
>>span.
> 
> Bacula can do it with the right modules installed, if I'm not
> mistaken.

It can.  There's fairly well documented methods of setting it up.

>>As for backing up multiple clients with free software the two I
>>hear most often lately are Amanda and Backula.  Amanda does a great
>>many things but from personal experience it's hard to configure.  I
>>haven't used Backula personally but I know others that have.  Me?
>>I just use dump (0) or tar on the main server and make sure my wife
>>stores data there.  Easily scriptable and with Samba/NFS you can
>>back up most things on client machines without too much trouble.
>>I'm not sure about bare-metal restore for clients though which
>>seems to be something that perhaps you're looking for?
> 
> Bacula seems like it'll do what I want, including a native Windows
> client daemon. I dislike using SMB for backups because it really
> doesn't get all the info, especially cross-platform.

Technically, Bacula's native win32 client doesn't get ALL the data
either.  Microsoft has apparently gone out of their way to make it hard
for third-party tools to back up the registry, and even using ntbackup
to dump system state, Bacula cannot get ALL registry data.  It's widely
reported that it can't get the registry hive for the logged-in user,
even when using ntbackup as a helper, and some people have reported that
they can't get any user registries backed up at all (again even using
ntbackup).


(IMHO, the registry -- with its obscurity, fragility, and difficulty of
backing it up -- is one of the major Achilles' heels of Windows.)


-- 
 Phil Stracchino       phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net
    Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker
 Mobile: 408-592-8081         Landline: 603-886-3518