I'm looking at replacing work's current tape backup system. Currently, this is a poblem where we're using tapes of a certain size, and we're maxing out that size so it's spilling over to two tapes, which is messing up rotations. Getting bigger tapes in this instance requires upgrading the tape system, which is ridiculously expensive. So, disk storage being cheap as all get, and easy to implement (physically anyway), I figured I'd look at that direction.
We have Windows servers and a lot more Linux servers to backup bits from. Every piece of software I've looked at sucks, and very few of them want to do DAS targets. DAS would probably make managing the drives for swapping out easier, but that's just my opinion. Not to mention, all the software I have found is also rather expensive for managing the copying of files. I'd pay a few hundred for something, but everything I've found either doesn't do DAS (online is the new thing, unless you have TBs of data to backup and can't do that online) or kills you in all the "agents" licenses they'd need. What have you seen that isn't crap and will backup to a local disk I can then swap out like a tape? Also, Amanda is cool, but I can't seem to find any docs about DAS as a target. The enterprise zmanda does, but Amanda seems fairly limited. I might mess with it if someone has better experience than my VERY limited exposure. (As an aside, seriously, backup software sucks, especially in the restore area. What ever happened to backing up files and then just giving me a dialog to choose what files and what timeslice I wanted to restore them to? Why is that so difficult for backup vendors to get?) Cheers, -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
