[rescue] Backups

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 12:20, Jeffrey Nonken wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:09:21 -0500 (CDT), Mike Hebel wrote:
> 
> > Just a note on price - the DLT drives are cheap because they are
> > corporate take-outs usually.  Nine times out of ten they were taken
> > out because of capacity not wear.  I've met very few DLT drives
> > that needed anything more than a cleaning tape to ensure proper
> > operation.  DLT3000/4000 drives are cheap because one hard drive is
> > now often beyond the capacity of a single tape.
> 
> OK, good to know. I'm still not sold on DLT but I'll take a look.

Since using DLT, I've never gone back.  Been bit by 8mm a couple
times (although mostly had good experiences, albeit never used
anything beyond an 8505XL).... I've never used 4mm, but generally
from talking to folks who have I consider them less reliable than
8mm...

But DLT has never bit me... 

What I wonder is what would a tape as physically large as a DLT
tape hold for capacity if it used helican scan heads ? :-)

> 
> > 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.

Bacula rocks !  I use it where I work (although they just bought
Veritas NetBackup and I have to migrate to that :-( ).  It is
architected much like the big backup progs (Networker, NetBackup,
etc).

It doesn't have the 'nice' gui... and some of the advanced features,
but the basics are there and it just plain works.

> 
> > 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.
> 
> Looks like it's going to be a bit of work to configure but there's
> lots of documentation and, well, seems like everything I have to do in
> Unix is going to require a bit of work to set up, so it's just one
> more item on the list.

Not that bad to configure... but if you configure a Pool, and Fileset
for each host, then you end up with a Pool, Fileset, Client, and Job
entry for each host... which starts to make the config a bit big...
if you chunk stuff up into the same Pool(s) and use a common Fileset
it will keep the file smaller.

For security you can setup the communication between the daemons to
go over stunnel based connections.  Last I looked they did not have
native SSL support for daemon communication in the program(s).

-- Curt

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