Osma Ahvenlampi wrote:
>
> Amanda's main problem is that it depends on tar or dump, and neither
> is all that great. Especially dump on Linux has major problems (no
> multivolume backups, no proper end-of-tape detection (which means
> trouble on at least Sony and Seagate drives), no software compression
AMANDA can use xfsdump on IRIX, bfsdump on Solaris (?) and may support
other proprietary dump software, so it is not completely dependent on
dump or tar as you say. My preference is gnutar because I can recover
the tapes on any machine regardless of the platform, or the original
platform of the data. The tape length is defined in the AMANDA
configuration and handled by AMANDA, so the lack of proper End-Of-Tape
detection in tar or dump is a moot point--If you get the right tapetype
definition, or use the "tapetype" program to get an accurate measure of
how much data you can really get on a tape, you should not have any
problems with Sony or Seagate drives.
AMANDA supports gzip software compression on the server or the
client--for fast machines, client-side compression conserves network
bandwidth, and for slow machines, server-side compression takes the load
off the client. It would not be difficult to add support for bzip2
compression.
Dumps are split into chunks and cached on holding disk(s)--I have ~16 GB
holding space which the clients dump to in ~2 GB or less chunks, and the
server streams the chunks to tape. Backups could be allowed to span
multiple volumes by putting chunks on multiple tapes. This arrangement
allows both dumping and streaming to tape to run with optimum
efficiency. I can easily keep ~500 GB disk space backed up with just an
Exabyte 10h with 8505-XL.
> (which is absolutely necessary if you want to compress AND need to
> know how much data fits on one tape) and so on)..
>
> I've recommended Arkeia before, and I'll recommend it again. Good
> feature set, reliable, supports many platforms, and is surprisingly
> inexpensive as commercial backup software goes. Check
> www.arkeia.com. I have no other relation to them except as a satisfied
> customer.
Can you recover Arkeia backups without the Arkeia software?
Inexpensive? I don't think so. I calculated that it would cost about
$15,000 to buy all of the licenses for my site. Does the Arkeia
software automatically determine what level backups to do when like
AMANDA, or do you define arbitrary times to do various level backups in
the setup?
--
"Jonathan F. Dill" ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
