On Sun, 19 Dec 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > Problem is, in order to do an incremental, IFW must read the whole source > disk, AND the whole previous backup file, in order to generate the delta. > So although it technically *can* do incrementals, it takes forever (as > you've described for Druva) and hence not suitable for daily whole-system > incremental backups. But very well suited for all other purposes.
Our company has standard builds for clients and servers, so restoring a laptop is a simple matter of laying down the standard company build again for that model. In smaller offices around the world, we've been deploying instances of Avamar, which used to be small but is now owned by EMC. However, there's a virtual edition where you provide storage to a small cluster of VMs and install Avamar there instead of deploying a hardware shelf-based solution. We're in the process of evaluating doing the same thing with Symantec (nee Veritas) NetBackup. They're both enterprise level products with the associated price tag, but they both put a small client process on the host that allows dedupe before sending data, so they're great for remote office and on-the-road people. The system tracks its own blocks, keeps track of a hash table, and only if it hasn't seen the hash before does it query the server. The server checks to see if it has the hash already (from another client, perhaps) and if it does, no further data is sent. If it doesn't, only then is the data sent home to be stored. We've been very happy with Avamar in the field, though they only recently began supporting desktop/laptop backups and there are still the occasional kinks to work out. The product itself has been solid, and I've been impressed that even when there has been odd filesystem corruption on the linux VMs, their support has been able to go in and fix the problem with minimal, if any, data loss. Dedupe is really the only practical way to back up these types of clients. -Adam _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
