"Dr. David Kirkby" wrote:
> 
> Can anyone tell me if they use amanda and are a large commercial company
> (> 250 employees), a hospital or a university and if so how much it's
> used (whole institution, small department, single server etc). How many
> Gb do you back up (don't answer that if you feel its confidential, or
> you don't know).

Thank you to everyone who sent information about their large backups
using amanda. Some of the backups are well in excess of what is expected
here (~200-400 Gb) and the fact they are large institutions gives me a
good case to suggest that we take this route too. Clearly suggesting
package X developed by Mr. Y who has a few home users using it, would
not be a good case to implement it for backups. But this is clearly not
the case with amanda - there are plenty of big institutions using the
package for large backups. 

We don't have any database to back up and we don't (as far as I know)
back up a file system greater than the size of the tape drive. I know
one of the support people suggested to me for my home system that I did
not let file systems span tapes, so I doubt they will do so here.
However, as I said, I am not in the computer support group and have no
control over how backups are performed. I looked on the Sun web site and
see that transferring a licence of Veritas might not be free either,
depending on the hardware the machine is moved too. That too is a
convincing argument to stick with a free package. 

I might look at amanda for my home machine, although I'm tempted to
leave well along with my odd unix scripts run from cron. I've never had
a major catastropy (disk failure, # rm -rf / or similar) but whenever I
have needed to get back information, it has never presented me the
slightest problem. I occsionally boot from CD and back up the root file
system on the machine with clearly no open files at all. 

I print my own labels in a way that suits me, move some tapes off-site
etc. I will however look at the documentation, but are tending to think
"Don't fix what is not broke". However, I have a few other machines on
my network now, so perhaps its the time to sort out something better. I
don't tend to back them up at all, since the data on them is of no use
to me - I only use them to check software compiles on different hardware
and operating systems. 

Sorry I have not replied to anyone who sent me individual emails, but
the response as been huge, so I would spend all day replying to each
e-mail. I want to get some work done! 

Dr. David Kirkby PhD,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269
Internal telephone: ext 46408
e-mail davek AT medphys.ucl.ac DOT uk  
Web page: http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek