On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 03:01:09AM -0700, anthony fernandes wrote:
can some tell me a very good software which can be used to take back-up. automated back up. the infrastrure is somewhat like this 12 windows clients connected to a linux server which has samba installed in it. please tell me a few good options and the advanteges and disadvanteges of them incase u have used any. i will install and try them out.
I would suggest AMANDA
It supports SAMBA. We use it in our depts, because it basically satisfied the list of requirements that we had ...
1. Automated backup -- once running, its supposed to continue running unattended, until something really bad happens. 2. Notifications and reports. 3. Hierarchical, incremental backups that allow restoration to a specific date, upto something like a month back in time. 4. Support for our automated DLT tape changer. 5. Client-server architecture. 6. Should be possible to recover data with only tapes in hand, and nothing else. 7. A stricter requirement is that the recovery should not need specific binaries that might not be present on other machines. 8. Efficient use of network bandwidth. 10. Tapes should be managed in a human readable manner.
Everything works, the only problem is that we have yet to find a driver for the fiber channel adapter attached to the DLT tape changer mentioned in (4).
Amanda does not do a full backup of everything simultaneously, instead this is smoothened out over the entire backup cycle. The load on any given day is the same. We have a cycle of 15 days, which means that every client is completely backed up at least once in 15 days. The tape used on day 1 is used again on day 16. One might consider this a small drawback ... AMANDA requires a fresh tape for each day of the cycle.
One additional feature of AMANDA is that it can also do backups on hard disk, creating records for each day separately. We are currently exploring this for a newer setup.
Sameer.