Amanda has certainly proven its worth over the years. I'm just reluctant
to use tar as its archiver, due to its inability to recover from broken
media, and lack of CRC and other error checking..
You might be using it on 30 machines, for years, but how does it work when
restoring?
Hi,
There is no need to test restoring :-).
Seriously the tape can be read with just mt, dd, GNUtar / restore.
restore and GNUtar work fine for me and i think they are well tested
by an awful lot of people.
I have seen enough Linux Servers uptime killed by HD crash. We do a
full desaster recovery every few month. People restore accidental
deleted files quite often.
We use a mix of dump and gnutar for the backups. GNUtar 1.12 does
incrementals quite well. dump works fine too
but it is some pain, if a filesystem is very active during backup time
Those dumps get compressed with gzip by the client and sent over the network.
I do regularly read a full tape and do a gzip -tv on each
filesystems backup. So i have a CRC for a filesystem.
One big advantage is that backups are written to a tmp file
on the backup server and get sent to the streamer with full speed.
This reduces tape and drive wear a lot.
The other is that you can customize it and
e.g. stop sendmail while you backup /var/spool
Ciao
Dietmar
-- Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. Dietmar Braun, E-Mail: braun@highway.bertelsmann.de;