On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 11:29:08PM +0100, Kern Sibbald wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'll let "real users" such as Michel Meyers and others answer most of the 
> questions for you, but I thought I'd throw in a few minor comments.

Hi Kern,

Thanks for taking the time to reply personally and for all your work on
Bacula.

Also, I've got to say that we've all decided that Bacula has the best
slogan of any backup program we've ever seen ;-)

> Unless I am mistaken, Amanda mostly uses certain Unix programs like tar for 
> backing up and restoring data.  If that is the case, then it (Amanda) suffers 
> from exactly the same problem -- in fact a large number of problems such as 
> Bacula base backups on the date/time stamps, which is the origin of the 
> problem.

I have only ever used Amanda with the tar backend (never dump), so I can
only speak to that.  Amanda's tar backend works exclusively with, and
requires, GNU tar.  Amanda uses GNU tar's listed incremental mode.  See
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html
for details.

In short, tar notes every file's name, inode number, and [cm]time in a
separate file when performing the full backup.  When performing
incremental backups, it compares the state of the filesystem to the
recorded state and does what it needs to to update the state.

It also puts a list of all files in each backed up directory into the
archive with every operation.  When extracting an incremental archive,
when using -G (which amanda can), tar will actually delete files from
the host filesystem that weren't present at the time of the backup.

So, this solves both the problem of leaving deleted files around and the
problem of not noticing renamed/moved files.  Since Bacula appears to
already have essentially that information in its Catalog, it seems that
it already has the tools to accomplish the same thing.

> > Reading about how the author's test network is 
> > using token ring, 
> 
> I don't know where this quote came from, but I don't have a token ring, and I 
> have never had one.

I was sure I saw that in rel-bacula.pdf, but on looking now, I can't
find it.  Must have been mistaken.  Sorry about that.

Thanks,

-- John



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