On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 02:07:30AM +0530, Rohit Peyyeti wrote:
> Hello All:
> 
> I have machines on my network which are mix of windows and unix machines. 
> Right now, I'm managing backups (both full and incremental) through perl 
> scripts written by me. They have been working fine for quite some time now 
> but are due for upgrade. I was planning to rewrite those scripts to make it 
> more effecient. 
> 
> Recently somebody suggested me to take a look at amanda. I looks really neat
> and cool to me. I have some doubts though (if it will work in my kind of 
> setup) I will try to explain about my setup below:
> 
> I have couple of linux servers and windows servers. I have indentified what 
> shares on those servers which needs to be backed up. I will be needing one 
> FULL backup for linux servers and another FULL for windows per week and I 
> should also be able to run daily incremental backups for both windows and 
> linux machines. FULL backups usually run into 15 GB and incremental close to 
> 500 to 1 GB. Right now, I do some backups in the night and some in the 
> mornings (data is first written to some temp space where I pick it in the 
> mornings to write to the tape)
> 
> What I have is HP Tape drive (12/24) (without autoloader facility). Is this 
> kind of setup possible with Amanda? If yes, how do I go about setting it up?

General answer is yes.

Couple of things however.  There are several ways to backup
pc shares with amanda.  Perhaps the simplest, particularly if
you already have it setup, is samba.  However with most of the
techniques the special permissions, i.e. those not on unix/linux
are not retained.  Also, some things can't be backed up by
samba, eg. Sys Vol Info, registry, ...  So we are mostly talking
about user data files and possibly apps, ...

Second is the scheduling algorithm of amanda.  It is designed
to try to level out the amount of each daily backup.  You give
amanda a list of host/file-systems and samba-host/pc-host/shares
and you tell amanda how often you want a full backup.  Note,
you do not tell it when, just how often.  Then during each days
backup, amanda selects some entries from your list for full
backups and does the others as incrementals.  This lets you
maintain backups of large amounts of disk data on small tapes
and on no particular day do your backups run for 20 hours.
You could probably handle 100-140 GB of actual disk data on
your tapes with a 1 week "dumpcycle".

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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