On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:
On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:37:31AM +0200, mo wrote:
Hi Debian users :)
Information:
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
Release: 8.6
Codename: jessie
As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote...
but it does not really serve my needs anymore.
I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my
server, the backups i would then store on my NAS.
Make a long story short:
Have you guys a recommendation for me?
Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?
I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.
Mark
Yeppers! It runs in the wee hours of the night here, for an hour or so.
Currently backing up this machine, and 3 more on my little home network
here, using its own unique, distribute the nightly load to equalize as
much a it can given its list of what to back up with nightly backups
totaling 11 to 14 Gb per night.
When I first started using it, I had a DDS2 changer, but it wasn't very
dependable, and at only 4Gb per tape, limited what I could do. About
the time 500Gb Hd's came out, amanda had worked out a way to use virtual
tapes on a hard drive, so I converted. That has the advantage that
should I need to recover something, its random access instead of
sequential, so I can get back anything I need in just a few minutes,
most of which is spent studying the recovery docs because I've forgotten
how to do it. ;-)
With tapes, I could easily be a half a day recovering the same file
because each level of a backup has to be read from the start of the tape
until its found. If I need something whose last good backup was a level
3, it would have to back up and find the level0, which is the last full
backup, then find the level 1 and merge any changes, wash, rinse, and
repeat. A hard drive based system can do all that in seconds.
I was rather worried about the drive I use for amanda's v-tapes when I
saw almost 3 years ago that smartctl said it had 25 Reallocated sectors.
It still says 25 10 seconds ago. That drive, now a 1Tb drive
as /dev/sdc, now has 58357 Power up hours on it. I don't care what you
may have paid for a tape library, it cannot survive that long, when this
HD has done that for a $100 bill at the time I bought it. And I can put
this HD in a shirt pocket. The tape library would need a refrigerator
rated 2 wheel dolly to move it, and a similar second dolly to move its
tapes.
Whats not to like?
I've had far more trouble dealing with tar changes as its been updated
over the years than I've had with amanda itself. All have been fixable
in a day or two once you can post the breakage on the tar list. amanda
uses tar to do the bare metal work. A wrapper for tar in that sense,
and I then wrap amanda with a bash script that fixes the always a day
late record keeping that you can add to the v-tape image by making a
copy of amanda's database and writing it to the V-tape amanda just used,
so I can lose the main drive and have to start with a new install on a
fresh drive. With amanda I would install from the repo's on the new
drive. Its 2 or 3 steps, but in an hours time I can have this working
wheezy system with all its dross, put back on a new drive.
Cheers, Gene Heskett