LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
  To  : Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au>
  Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 15:48:26 +1030

Re: Backup Options

Glen and Damien!

> I use Amanda, and I'm faily impressed.  It's command line oriented, but
> does everything needed.

Whilst Amanda is command line oriented, the commands are very easy to
use and remember. They take the form of:

[amanda command] [configuration name] [other information]
(eg)
amstatus MAIN --failed

Furthermore, if you index your backups - very advisable if you have the
space and network bandwidth - you can use amrecover to retrieve your
files; this gives you a (command line) ftp like interface that
automatically works out what tapes you need, what order they should go
in and so forth...

> It's tape management is good too -- you can
> set it up to say "I've got this many tapes in a cycle, these are the
> important file systems, do the best you can at a tape a day".

In addition it won't let you clobber your own backups unless you really,
really tell it to. Furthermore, with a reaonable sized holding disk
(backup storage area on hard drives) you can give yourself a reasonable
amount of "leeway" in case your tape drive fails. At one place where I
have setup AMANDA we can survive for about 3 days of _full_ backups if
our tape drives fail.
 
> I uses the Red Hat RPMs, and I had to change a few device permissions
> to get it to work correctly.

Whereas compiling and building from source isn't too difficult either
[1]; the only caveat here is that it does use some setuid programs so
you can confuse yourself if you try to build and install it as a non
root user. Generally, the group "disk" has access to the "disks" - at
least where I am - so I didn't experience those permission problems.

Development in AMANDA appear to be:

* addition of multi-tape support (it's coming soonish)
* a security API
* a general API

The AMANDA list is very busy and very helpful. Most of the people who
maintain and develop it seem to have enough time to answer questions, no
matter how mundane. Just don't accuse AMANDA or smbtar of crashing your
Windows NT Server box [2] :-)

DL

[1]
This is coming from someone who has rebuilt almost every major library,
kernels and you name it; it took me 20 goes to get Mozilla (latest) to
build without crashing - it uses some program called "xpidl" (yes, x
piddle!!!) which would core dump on me...

[2]
Yes, somebody managed to accuse Samba of crashing Windows NT. After a
few, rather non-terse replies, someone pointed out that if Windows NT
crashes because it is serving files using a protocol it purports to
support then is it really Samba or AMANDA's fault that Windows NT
crashed?

-- 
Are you:
 - waiting for rigor mortis to set on?
 - or waiting for Santa Claus to arrive?
 (see Eric Berne, Beyond Games and Scripts)

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