[rescue] Backups

[Jeffrey Nonken]

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:09:21 -0500 (CDT), Mike Hebel wrote:

> Just a note on price - the DLT drives are cheap because they are
> corporate take-outs usually.  Nine times out of ten they were taken
> out because of capacity not wear.  I've met very few DLT drives
> that needed anything more than a cleaning tape to ensure proper
> operation.  DLT3000/4000 drives are cheap because one hard drive is
> now often beyond the capacity of a single tape.

OK, good to know. I'm still not sold on DLT but I'll take a look.

> But if DVDs will work for your amount of data then fine.  I think
> you'll have trouble implementing that on a 'nix system though.
> Someone mentioned  using cdrecord but I'm pretty sure that doesn't
> span.

Bacula can do it with the right modules installed, if I'm not
mistaken.

> As for backing up multiple clients with free software the two I
> hear most often lately are Amanda and Backula.  Amanda does a great
> many things but from personal experience it's hard to configure.  I
> haven't used Backula personally but I know others that have.  Me?
> I just use dump (0) or tar on the main server and make sure my wife
> stores data there.  Easily scriptable and with Samba/NFS you can
> back up most things on client machines without too much trouble.
> I'm not sure about bare-metal restore for clients though which
> seems to be something that perhaps you're looking for?

Bacula seems like it'll do what I want, including a native Windows
client daemon. I dislike using SMB for backups because it really
doesn't get all the info, especially cross-platform.

Looks like it's going to be a bit of work to configure but there's
lots of documentation and, well, seems like everything I have to do in
Unix is going to require a bit of work to set up, so it's just one
more item on the list.