On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 15:56, Jay MacDonald wrote: > On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 12:44, Eric Robinson wrote: > > With tar... > > > > Can I get detailed reports? > > Yes (with some creative scripting) Its not very hard to send tar output to a shell script, yet you are limited on the type of report.
> > Files and bytes backed up, files skipped/failed? > Yes (with some creative scripting) > > Can I restore individual files or directories? > Yes > > To different directories than the ones from which they were backed up? > Yes (with some creative scripting) my suggestion here would be to type 'man tar' as tar is very limited in the statistical output it gives, yet you could take that output and post-process it with a shell script to order the report. it'd be a hack, it would take a bit of time to develop the script for reporting, but it'd work yet not be exceedingly accurate. AMANDA can be very verbose in this, even predict how many tapes you will need and will span multiple tapes -- multi-tape-archiving is something that I do not think tar does ...at least it didn't in 1996 when i started with AMANDA. > > Can I create a bootable tape? > Not that I'm aware of. yes you can. its a bit difficult, however what I've done is used tar to create a monthly bootable base tape (/,/boot, /root, /etc, /usr, /bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin,/usr/bin, /usr/local, /var etc) that are used in conjunction with amanda to restore the more frequently backed-up stuff. > > Is bare metal restore possible? > I doubt it. I don't parse this statement. > Seriously, mention the features you're looking for before getting anal > about it. All you asked for was to back a server up to tape. Sheesh... yeah, there are a gazillion ways to skin a cat, however it really depends on how you want to use the cat-fur. AMANDA is probably more along the lines of what you want -- coupled with a monthly tar based bootable system restore tape and you'd have a pretty decent enterprise grade tape archive system. Yet a note about building bootable systems tapes -- given your security requirements I would be more prone to use distro-based CD-Roms or build a control master system image on a disk, put that disk in a locked file cabinet, and jumpstart/kickstart/netboot/ or DD it from the control master. It would be far easier to use a secured, non-tampered with live OS on READ-ONLY media than check every md5 hash on every file on the tape bootable-tapes you are restoring from. this also would protect you from the rare occurrence that someone has managed to patch a system binary and get an exact md5 hash. A dd of a system will take a hell of allot less time than your fastest tape drive and then you wouldnt have to worry about restoring compromised systems binaries back to a system. Chris -- Christopher Neitzert http://www.neitzert.com/~chris 775.853.5314 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - GPG Key ID: 7DCC491B
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
