Re: backup

[Bart-Jan Vrielink <bartjan@vrielink.net>]

On Mon, 2002-12-16 at 19:50, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 19:36, C. R. Oldham wrote:
> > We used to use Amanda before we got a tape library and began backing up
> > all our servers into the library.  We have a heterogenous network
> > (Linux, Win2000 with Exchange, Oracle).  My experience with Amanda is
> > that it works pretty well if you
> > are doing Unix clients only, but doing a heterogenous network requires
> > lots of scripting.  Plus Amanda doesn't drive tape changers/libraries
> > out of the box.  It needs some scripting to do that as well.
> 
> I'm only interested in backing up Linux and Solaris servers (and Solaris is 
> optional) so lack of cross platform support is not a problem.

This is no problem with Amanda. As was said, Amanda does not support
Windows directly and uses smbclient via a gateway to do Windows backups
and that's why our only Windows server has its own tapedrive.

The only scripting I did was a wrapper that dumps the mysql databases
and creates the LVM snapshots that will be backed up and ejects the tape
when the backup was succesful (this way the human tape robot knows the
backup was ok and next day's tape should be inserted).

> How difficult is the scripting to change tapes?  What exactly needs to be 
> done?

Although I've never used a tapechanger myself, I think the only
difficulty is that there are many types of tapechanges that are
supported by Amanda and you'll need to find out which script you need
for your changer.
I haven't been on the amanda-users@amanda.org for a few years, but it is
an excelent mailinglist.

Amanda is great, but there are a few things it can't do:
- append to tapes (it is a good thing that Amanda can't do this...)
- spread a partition over multiple tapes.

Another 'strange' behaviour of Amanda is that it does not do 'daily' and
'weekly' backups, it just spreads out all backups over its backup cycle
and optimizes the tape usage. This gives better results than doing daily
incrementals etc. but might be a hard thing to explain to your boss when
he wants to do a full backup each friday.

> Does anyone have some sample scripts?

/usr/share/doc/amanda-common/docs/TAPE.CHANGERS.gz
If you don't have amanda-common installed, or don't have the amanda
source local, then you could use google to find a version, like on
http://www.clug.in-chemnitz.de/vortraege/amanda/docs/TAPE.CHANGERS or
somewhere else.

-- 
Tot ziens,
Bart-Jan Vrielink