>I ask you patience, understanding and help. ... That's pretty much the motto of this mailing list :-).
>First let me explain my paradigm, so you'll understand my questions. ... That was well described. First, we run quite a bit of AIX here, as well as Solaris and a bit of Linux. So our situations are similar. Basically, you have things right. Amanda is not a disaster recovery backup in the sense of pop the tape in, boot from it and when you come back the system is up and running. It is more of a file system and individual file recovery tool. If the system completely croaks, Amanda expects you to get it booted in some way (for Solaris, that's probably from an installation CD), then you can use Amanda to get your data back. FYI, we do both Amanda and mksysb's on our AIX systems (and I do what I call a "root-emergency" tar of my Solaris systems). There is way too much data for mksysb, so those tapes are only to get a system back on its feet after a complete mess. After that, Amanda would be used to bring back the homes, optional stuff, etc. >... 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. ... The flip side of ufsdump, ufsrestore, allows individual files to be selected for restoration. In fact, any restore program I know of (including tar) does. So to pull back just a few files for a user is just a matter of knowing what command line flags to use. One of the things Amanda provides is a common interface. So, for instance, you tell Amanda you want a particular file back, and it deals with whether the image was created with backup, dump, ufsdump, tar or whatever. >....though how you would use a tar'ed tape to restore an > OS is another thing. ... Tar is capable of dumping everything in a file system. If everything your OS needs to run is in the file system, a tar restore (once the machine is booted, e.g. from CD) works fine. You do get into issues where there is more than the file system involved. In AIX, that would be the dreaded ODM :-). Even in Solaris, you would need to run installboot to write the boot sector. I don't know enough about Linux, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out there's more than just a dump of "/" involved there, too. These items are outside the realm of Amanda. We assume you're proficient enough with your OS to deal with them. You're also right that keeping other information (partitioning for instance) is important for non-AIX systems. However, that's true regardless of whether Amanda is involved or not. So, does that explain things a bit? If you have other questions, just post. >Stewart Dean John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
