On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 14:31, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> 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.  ;)

If you're not on a shoestring budget, I'd say knock yourself out, there
are some great (but usually expensive) packages out there that are very
easy to set up and maintain, though this list is not the best place to
get that sort of information.  Veritas, Arkeia, and Legato are three
packages I would definitely check out if money was not an object.

You could, however, consider a sort of hybrid approach to handle the
'doze machines, which is what I am thinking about right now.

In a nutshell, you would use some other mechanism to make the 'doze
machines back themselves up to a share, and then you would use amanda to
backup that share periodically.

Windows XP Professional has a built-in backup/restore function, which is
one option that I plan to try.  I am using a 1 TB Snap Appliance 4500
NAS which came bundled with Backup Express for Guardian OS and an
unlimited number of Windows clients, so that is another option that I
plan to try.  The Snap itself runs Guardian OS, which is some flavor of
Linux, and I have it NFS mounted on my amanda server, and also use it as
my holding disk for amanda backups. Then I can use GNUTAR with amanda to
backup the directory where the 'doze machines have taken a dump.

A lot of Windows people I have talked to lately are using a 2nd hard
drive on USB or Firewire to do backups, or in a cold-swap cartridge. 
Norton Ghost is a popular application to do that, also XP Pro
backup/restore, and even robocopy (is that Win2K Pro?) with varying
degrees of automation. DVD+R with 4.7 GB capacity is popular for
longer-term storage.

The latest Norton Suite 2004 Pro looks like makes it pretty easy to
automate Ghost backup to a 2nd disk or to DVD+R (I have it on the
Windows partition of my home computer) but I mainly use Windows for
games and don't care enough about losing that data to have put the
effort into automating backups.

--jonathan