On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 09:26:30AM -0400, Doug Carroll wrote: > Very interested in something similar as well. > We need to be able to Backup at the System level as well as perform > individual file restores of application data. > Is there a package or several packages recommended by the group for this > purpose?
Depends on what you want to spend, and whether you can fund hardware upgrades. The big issue is tape drive access and management, and the fact I mentioned in my earlier note -- *nothing* in the Linux world uses IBM standard SL tapes, so you have to invent some new procedures for vault management. >From the open source world, Amanda (www.amanda.org) and Bacula (www.bacula.org) are popular, reliable, and well-supported. Bacula is relatively new on the scene, but looks to be a major functional upgrade. Both support generic Unix/Linux and Windows clients anywhere there's an IP network connection between client and server. Bacula's Windows client is native; Amanda's Windows client requires Cygwin, which is a bit more complex, but also offers additional useful services. Amanda is included with most of the distributions, and Bacula is appearing in the newer ones (available on Debian now, SuSE soon, RH unknown). Both support the NFS/DFSMS technique I describe in my paper. Both are reliable and provide level 0 and incremental file backups. You'll still probably want to use some kind of image backup tool occasionally just for speed reasons, but both products are "good enough". Commercial support is available for both from a number of sources (including us). If you have money to spend, FDR and CA have Linux backup products, but: For the FDR product, you need a z/OS or OS/390 system. The CA product is quite expensive, and is somewhat complicated to set up. I tend to point people at Amanda (and now Bacula -- as I get more experience with it, I get more and more impressed with it). Bacula is a viable TSM replacement at this point, and has none of the irritating "features" of TSM. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
