Re: Backup systems: opinons wanted
Udjat the BitMeister <udjat@bitburn.org> wrote:
> I use bru 2000 and I am _very_ happy with it.
> I also us cpio to copy my whole filesystem(/) to a different partition
> (/snapshot) to have a online read-only backup of files.
> You could get by with cpio but I like the tape verify and features of bru
> 2000. Take a look at www.estinc.com
Well the price is certainly right!
I can offer up my own opinons:
dump - I really like the interface when you do a restore. Being able
to navigate the tape in a directory structure and picking and choosing
the files/directories you want to restore. Unfortunately, I also run
Win95 on my PC and enjoy being able to back up all my paritions,
including FAT, under Linux. In fact, I don't even make my SCSI devices
visible to Win95. dump, at least on my machine, won't back up FAT
partitions.
cpio and variants - Never used 'em, at least not for backups.
GNU tar - It works great and you can take the tapes to just about any
other machine with the same type of drive and yank whatever you want
off. I don't like the fact that it insists on backing up empty
directories and directories that contain files that haven't changed
since the last backup. I haven't delved much into the incremental/full
capabilities that are built into tar, I generally use a script that
records the date of a particular backup and then use the "--newer"
argument to do incrementals based on the date my script records.
My main gripe with all of the backup utilities I've used is you have
to manually come up with some method to get decent redundancy. For
example, I use two sets of tapes, each set has a single full backup
tape (or tapes if a full backup required more than a single tape) and
a couple of incremental tapes associated with that full backup
tape. This is pretty much standard procedure for doing backups on a
LAN, yet every place I worked as a sysadmin had their own "script" to
keep track of what set of tapes was next and what was on previous sets
of tapes, etc. Does anyone know of a better solution? My script works
fine, but it's a royal pain to have to keep track of what tapes have
what, and what incremental tape I need to use next. Of course I could
make my script more elaborate but my main purpose in life isn't to
write a perfect backup script, especially if I could find an existing
piece of software that already does this!
Any suggestions?
Gary Hennigan
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