On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 at 12:58pm, Michael Kahle wrote
> If I am understanding this correctly, Amanda has no way to incrementally
> backup a disk that also uses a exclude list to prevent it from backing up
> certain files. This seams to me to be an important feature included in a
> backup package.
This is incorrect. I use exclude lists and tar extensively, and it Just
Works, including (obviously) incrementals.
> 2. Not an intuitive way to think about backing things up. This rant is
> somewhat related to the above rant. :) The exclude files need to be
> written on the client? Again, from the EXCLUDE documentation, "An exclude
> list is a file that resides on the CLIENT machine and contains paths to be
> excluded, one per line. This file can be in any location on the CLIENT so
> long as the same path is specified in the dumptype." Why should it be
> necessary for the CLIENT to have this information reside on it. If one
> thinks about backups using a CLIENT-SERVER model, I would think it would
> only be necessary to have a client piece accept instructions from the server
> and do the backups based on those instructions. The server should contain
> information necessary to backup all clients connected to the system. Not
> some client specific information on the server and other client information
> on the client.
With recent versions of amanda, you *can* do all the exlucing and
including in the disklist. Look in the amanda(8) man page for 'include
append' and 'exclude append'. I personally think it makes sense having
the exclude list on the client. I put it in the top level of the
directory it applies to (named .exclude). This makes it very easy to look
at and figure out what's being excluded, what needs to be, and whether
anything is being missed. It also allows me to have one dumptype that
does excludes, and apply that to as many disklist entries as I need to.
> Amanda also has a lack of support for other areas that I need to have a
> backup solution for. I currently have in my environment 5 NT servers, 1
> runs Exchange 5.5 and one that runs MSSQL Server 2000. I am able to run a
> backup job in MSSQL that dumps the database to a file and I have amanda
> backup that file. It works fine, but for the Exchange server I am left to
> backup using BackupExec. :( I touched on this on a post I made yesterday,
> sort of, when I asked about a native client for MS products using the Backup
> API. Are these API's free to link to? That is, could one write software
> using gnu compilers to use these libraries and write a robust interface to
> backup Microsoft products like Exchange, MSSQL, the registry, file system,
> etc? Has this road every been crossed? How do other backup solutions
> attack this problem?
As was mentioned recently, amanda will compile and run under cygwin, but
this (obviously) doesn't use the MS backup API. There was (IIRC) an
amanda-win32 project at one point that may have been using those, but I
think it went under.
It is true that it takes some wedging to make amanda work in a 'doze heavy
environment -- that's simply not what it was designed for. As for advice
on commercial solutions, this isn't exactly the best place to ask. ;)
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
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