[Sussex] Suggestions for backup software

[Karl E. Jørgensen]

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:31:39AM +0100, Ronan Chilvers wrote:
> Hi Karl
> 
> On Mon, 8 May 2006 15:26:57 +0100
> Karl E. Jørgensen <karl at jorgensen.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm curiuos as to why you think Amanda is heavy duty - I find it
> > absolute excellent. 
> > ...
> 
> The reason I didn't look at using Amanda is because I'm looking for a
> backup solution for a single machine.  The server in question has a
> tape drive in it and a large disk array.  The primary server mirrors
> onto the backup server to provide redundancy and the backup
> server then runs tape jobs to provide offline backups.  As I understand
> it Amanda is geared towards larger scale, network based backups of many
> machines, which I don't need.

True - it is geared towards backing up multiple machines.

But... It sounds like you have multiple machines. Although much of the
data is mirrored (and thus you only need to back up one side of the
mirror), there's bound to be things on the master server that is not
mirrored, isn't there?  [I'm not familiar with the details of your
configuration, so I'm guestimating here].  

If so, then you probably want to back up /, /boot and possibly /var and
/usr on the main server too - essentially the bits that are not
mirrored. 

> However if you think that Amanda would suit my needs, I'll give it
> another look?  I'm not doubting its quality at all, only that it may be
> a sledgehammer to crack a nut!?!

There's a slight "sledgehammer-quality" to it - but that's not
necessarily a bad thing.  It gives you some freedom to scale up if you
need too.  Besides, if you've got servers, then you probably have
clients too.  Depending on your recovery scenarios, you might need to be
able to recover the clients too ?  Although I haven't played with
backing up windows boxes, I remember seeing something about it in the
documentation.

At the end of the day: Go with the solution you're most confident with,
and try out a few restore scenarios: lost single files, lost disk,
recovery-from-bare-metal etc.

Hope this helps
-- 
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl at jorgensen.org.uk  http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl at jorgensen.com     http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
"It's in process":
	So wrapped up in red tape that the situation is almost hopeless.
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