On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:25:22 -0500 Chris Hoogendyk <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are a lot of issues and questions here, and some of them can be > very personal. For, example, I'm totally happy with a simple command > line interface, whereas some people won't even consider a piece of > software unless it has some sort of graphical interface, even if it > is just a web interface. I like cli and do not have problem with it. ;) > Anyway, that's just by way of illustration. When you mentioned Java, I had enough. :-) > If you want a general sense of why I like Amanda, see > http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2007/09/27/ten-things-i-like-about-amanda/ . > It's slightly dated, but still pertinent, in spite of both Amanda and > Bacula having seen a huge amount of development work in the last few > years. Very nice article. I really enjoyed it. ;) > That was a significant part of my choosing Amanda. It is pretty much > straight to the point. You don't have to install and configure an SQL > database (and manage it's tuning and performance); you don't have to > configure multiple server daemons (storage, database, backup); it is > run from the OS (cron), so you don't have to worry about whether it > is still running or not (having to put in a nagios module to watch > it); it uses native tools on the OS, so you don't have to worry about > being able to read the tapes if your backup server goes belly up; and > I believe the configuration of Amanda is much easier, as long as you > get the point of the planning strategy that Amanda uses -- Huh...this is very true and compelling... > If you go with the enterprise edition from Zmanda, you can get a > graphical console that is very advanced. I'll stay with community version, but don't have need for gui. > Bare metal is bare metal. I don't think there is much difference in > concept getting your system back up. The huge difference is that > Amanda tapes can be read with native OS tools. So, you don't have to > get Amanda installed and reconfigured in order to access your tapes. This is huge advantage. > append is the idea that one backup run can be added to the end of a > tape used by the previous backup run, continuing until the tape is > full. Some (including me) are philosophically against that. It poses > risks of losing all those backups if one fails in writing to the > tape, and it eliminates the redundancy of your backups by putting all > (or many of) your eggs in one basket. I prefer more tapes and don't > mind if they happen to be largely empty. That just means I still have > growth for the future, which is always an issue. Heh...more eggs in the basket is good explanation. > overwrite is when a tape comes around for being re-used. Well, I understand about 'append' & 'overwrite', but wonder why the FAQ entry is named "Why does Amanda not *append* to a tape?" while the answer speaks about: "...Amanda was designed to never *overwrite* a non-Amanda tape.." It looks that FAQ entry mixes the concepts? > So, the re-use of tapes by Amanda is somewhat simpler. Right. No need to extra layer of Pools as in Bacula...We like simiplicity. > It is controlled by the tape cycle. If you want to use a tape as an archive > (set aside and not re-used), you can use amadmin to mark that tape as > no-reuse. This is nice & simple. We might use it for our 'multimedia archive'. ;) > I hope that helps. Yeah...I'm thankful to all those who responded and I believe I'm going to install Amanda. :-) Question: considering that I may start using Amanda while still being on x86_64 Linux, what would be procedure to migrate my setup on x86_64 Free(PC)BSD? And there is one gotcha with Amanda: posting from Gmane does not work...if anyone has idea how to fix it it, it would be great!! Sincerely, Gour (new Amanda user preferring to read/post_to mailing lists via Gmane) -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA
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