> Gordon J. Mills III wrote: > > Josef, here are some of my comments about TSM that I sent > to a lister > > off list. I think in a later email I will try to list the > things that > > I liked about TSM that I would like to see in Amanda. Some > may not be possible. > > > > At my previous job we used TSM and it is a very nice backup > solution. > > We had a tape library that held about 250 tapes and up to 8 > drives (We > > had 5 drives in it). It seems to excel at backing up large > amounts of > > data. One unique thing it does is that it uses and "incremental > > forever" backup strategy. It backs up a machine fully only once (it > > can probably be setup other ways, but that's the way we > used it)<--(I > > could be wrong about that). There is a backup server > (similar to the > > way Amanda is setup) and it has a database that keeps track of > > everything that has been backed up (all files). It knows > what files are on what tapes (Also similar to Amanda). > > > > One possible downside of the TSM approach is this database. > If it is somehow lost or corrupted, all you have is a bunch > of tapes with random chunks of data that may not be > recoverable into its original structure. While it is a > robust database, things can happen (such as failing RAID or > SAN controllers wiping out all of your redundant disks), so > you need to make sure that you have backups of the database > that are outside of TSM (somewhat similar to what can happen > if you lose your Amanda indexes, except that with Amanda you > can use native tools to restore everything on your tapes. > > Frank > > > -- > Frank Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sr. Systems Administrator Voice: 512-374-4673 > Hoover's Online Fax: 512-374-4501 >
Hello Frank. That is true, as you point out the DB becomes VERY important in this type of backup scheme. I believe the way we handled it was to use their BMR (Bare Metal Recovery) on the backup server (and other critical servers). I suspect it backs up everything necessary to rebuild the database in case of failure. Of course this all goes towards the more overhead necessary for such a scheme. Regards, Gordon
