I am interested in Amanda, but my vision of backup/restore is colored by my previous experience with them...so much I what I've read (the Unix Backup chapter, etc) is dissonant with my own conceptual backup paradigm.
I ask you patience, understanding and help. First let me explain my paradigm, so you'll understand my questions. I come from an AIX background, from mksysb or its more powerful descendant, sysback. mksysb is a fire and forget full system backup and restore. One command get you the operating system complete. The machine fails, you stuff in the tape, start the machine, and, when the tape finishes, everything is back...you do get some choices, but basically the OS and data included with it gets restored without your fiddling with partitions or original OS media or patches: Backup to one tape, restore from one tape, virtually no sysadmin interaction. Magic. Sysback does the same with more bells and whistles...incremental backups, restore to different IBM processor platform, backup/restore of non-OS data filesystems, restore of individual files up to the whole OS. More Magic. So: I can restore individual user files (nothing you couldn't do with tar) or reincarnate a fire/flood destroyed server onto new hdwe with the same tape. But now I have Sun and Linux machines to backup as well. I read Amanda doc and I read about backup but it doesn't fit with my understanding. I can see dumping (ufsdump on Solaris) a whole filesystem and restoring it....though how you get an individual file out of it, is another thing. I can see taring a filesystem so that you can give the idiot user back his deleted files....though how you would use a tar'ed tape to restore an OS is another thing. It's sort of like building a bridge while standing on thin air...maybe Wile Coyote can do it (for a while, until he looks down). How do you do both? AIX and sysback have built-in magic, but..... OK, I know that most OSes haven't got the stuff to automagically restore themselves like AIX...anyway, to restore a Solaris machine, you ufsdump all filesystems, then, to restore, you have to install from the media, partition the disk(s) (you did save the partition info, right?) and then ufsrestore the filesystems one at a time. After AIX stuff, this is incredibly clanky, labor intensive and error prone, but hey Sun is an industry leader. But at least this makes some sense to me. Doing it from a tar doesn't seem possible. Enlighten my darkness...or is Amanda not a disaster recovery backup, but only individual file backup/restore system? -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
