On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 14:31, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote: > It is true that it takes some wedging to make amanda work in a 'doze heavy > environment -- that's simply not what it was designed for. As for advice > on commercial solutions, this isn't exactly the best place to ask. ;)
If you're not on a shoestring budget, I'd say knock yourself out, there are some great (but usually expensive) packages out there that are very easy to set up and maintain, though this list is not the best place to get that sort of information. Veritas, Arkeia, and Legato are three packages I would definitely check out if money was not an object. You could, however, consider a sort of hybrid approach to handle the 'doze machines, which is what I am thinking about right now. In a nutshell, you would use some other mechanism to make the 'doze machines back themselves up to a share, and then you would use amanda to backup that share periodically. Windows XP Professional has a built-in backup/restore function, which is one option that I plan to try. I am using a 1 TB Snap Appliance 4500 NAS which came bundled with Backup Express for Guardian OS and an unlimited number of Windows clients, so that is another option that I plan to try. The Snap itself runs Guardian OS, which is some flavor of Linux, and I have it NFS mounted on my amanda server, and also use it as my holding disk for amanda backups. Then I can use GNUTAR with amanda to backup the directory where the 'doze machines have taken a dump. A lot of Windows people I have talked to lately are using a 2nd hard drive on USB or Firewire to do backups, or in a cold-swap cartridge. Norton Ghost is a popular application to do that, also XP Pro backup/restore, and even robocopy (is that Win2K Pro?) with varying degrees of automation. DVD+R with 4.7 GB capacity is popular for longer-term storage. The latest Norton Suite 2004 Pro looks like makes it pretty easy to automate Ghost backup to a 2nd disk or to DVD+R (I have it on the Windows partition of my home computer) but I mainly use Windows for games and don't care enough about losing that data to have put the effort into automating backups. --jonathan