Chris Karakas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Conrad and David,
>
[...]
> I think the time of truth has come: AMANDA *cannot* backup Windows
> filesystems correctly, contrary to the many claims to the opposite! It
> will *not* compute incrementals correctly. This is something that those
> who evaluate it as a possible candidate for Linux _and_ Windows backups
> should seriously take into account. I have been struggling with this the
> past six months without success :-(
>
> Consider the following situation: you try to minimize the Windows
> footprint on your network. You migrate to Linux and SAMBA. Windows is
> run only on the clients: all your data and applications are on the vfat
> filesystems of the SAMBA server which runs Linux. Now you want to back
> all this up. Your backup server is the SAMBA server itself, running
> AMANDA. There are Linux filesystems on the server, Linux filesystems on
> the Linux clients, vfat filesystems on the server and vfat filesystems
> of the Windows clients. The clients with the vfat filesystems run on
> Windows, the server runs on Linux. You don't care that much about the
> vfat files on the Windows machines, because these are easily reproduced.
> You *do* care about your data and apps on your Linux server, be it ext2
> or vfat.
>
> In this situation, AMANDA will *fail* do do its job for the vfat files
> on the server! The incrementals on these files may (or will) be computed
> wrongly. They may (or will) be almost as large as full backups, taking
> up so much space on your tapes, that almost all of the other full
> backups will be delayed, or not done at all. Of course, you can increase
Why do you use VFAT on the server? Samba can do it's job on all file
systems. Unix/Linux file systems like ext2 allow for a much more
flexible administration of Samba because you can use Samba's access
control on top of standard Unix access rights.
Johannes Niess
