Alan Brown wrote: > On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Chris Hoogendyk wrote: > >> For example, in the commercial realm, EMC Retrospect will properly >> restore incremental backups with deleted files removed. In the open >> source realm, Amanda will also properly handle deleted files in >> incremental backups. > > When did Amanda gain that feature? I didn't see it last time I looked...
It may not be specifically listed as a feature in the documentation. Amanda uses the native utilities to actually do the backups. On Solaris that would be ufsdump. I did a series of tests in which I deleted files and moved files from one directory to another after a full backup and before an incremental backup. When I did the restore of the full, the deleted and moved items were there in their original positions, but when I did the restore of the incremental on top of the full, they magically disappeared and moved items ended up in their proper locations. Gnutar also will handle deleted files: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/tar/Incremental-Dumps.html ; and, if you were to use Amanda on linux, you would do it with gnutar. Alan Brown also wrote: > On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Jason A. Kates wrote: > >> I wouldn't say that this is a bug. The shrink wrapped backup softare >> that you will pay 10's of K for work in the same way. If it's that >> much of an issue just do fulls for that file system. >> > > Jason is correct, there are only a couple of (very expensive) backup > packages which do deletion tracking over differential/incremental backups. > > I have a similar situation with maildir format areas. My current solution > is weekly full backups. > Actually EMC Retrospect is not "very expensive". However, I'm not sure whether it meets other high end features and needs that people may have. EMC pushes it for the SMB market and has their own high end expensive product, Legato Networker. Years ago I used Retrospect for company wide tape backups for a small company (50 Macs), and now I use it for small workgroups to handle their own backups to a disk archive on my servers (less than $500 U.S. for a one "server" and 20 client license). But I'm not going to consider commercial applications for my primary server/network backups. Don't need to. Open source handles it quite well. I just don't want to push that on the non techy small workgroups, and I don't have the manpower to take direct responsibility for their backups. In the free arena, besides Amanda, there is rsync, and a google search of "incremental deleted files" turns up a number of others (as well as commercial products). Interestingly, that google search also turns up a patent that was issued to IBM in 2005 for "a system and associated method for restoring a file system from incremental backups in the presence of deletion, without restoring deleted files." Amazing how big companies can get patents for ideas that have been around for a while. More interestingly, Network Appliance also has a patent that involves specialized header types for deleted files, Star Softcomm (Singapore) has a patent that includes references to incrementals handling deleted files, Teradactyl LLC has a patent on a backup procedure that includes metadata for deleted files, HP has a patent that includes identifying deleted files between full and delta backups, and Howard Lee and Benjamin Cutler have a patent for an archival system that tracks file deletions. (I just added patentstorm to my search to sift all that to the top.) So, without going out and examining all our competitors in detail, I do think that's sufficient evidence that it is inaccurate to say "only a couple". --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------- Erdös 4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
