Hello all,
I have been asked to make an emergency purchase of hardware and software
for my district. (about 9am we had the tape drives fail..)
I have two sets of backups going for 15+ FreeBSD servers. One being
done by BackupPC for myself and another on Windows software for State
Compliance.
The windows backup is being done to comply with state auditors on a
commercial piece of software being done on a Windows server with a tape
drive; which gets removed and archived. Commercial is not a
requirement, but the people operating the backup can point and click and
drag and drop..
The tape drive has died and they are in need of a new drive and we would
love to solve the symlink problem the windows backup program currently has.
The symlink problem is that the windows software does not have a FreeBSD
agent and has samba shares to the Windows servers; these samba shares is
how the backups are done.
The win2k3 server sees the symlinks as users do; actual folders. It
perceives that each folder is its own copy of data and saves the content
of the share as a unique file.
BackupPC being a *nix based program understands the concept of symlinks
and deals with the restoring and saving of data effectively (and in our
eyes correctly). It does not duplicate the backing up of files. It
does restore files to where you want them to. It does show the
restoring user what they expect to see when looking for a file.
I am trying to get an answer to the question of: "What does bacula do
with archiving to tape and symbolic links?"
This is an example of symlink'd folders inside my own /home
science-folder@ -> /home/groups/phs-science
shared-english@ -> /exports/groups/phs-english
shared-home@ -> /home
shared-journalism@ -> /exports/groups/phs-journalism
shared-science@ -> /exports/groups/phs-science
shared-tcentral@ -> /exports/groups/phs-tcentral
shared-teachers@ -> /exports/groups/phs-teachers
shared-yearbook@ -> /exports/groups/phs-yearbook
This allows us to create shares for the windows and mac users without
them having to have multiple mountpoints, (ex F,G,H,I,J,K, etc..) We
map one share per user and manipulate symlinks on the back end to join
people and students together.
so assuming the /exports directory is backed up on the tape as well, and
the file I am looking to restore whatever.file.
(to the end user) is shared-yearbook/2011/whatever.file
(to the OS) is /exports/groups/phs-yearbook/2011/whatever.file
What does the person performing the restore have to know?
What does the person performing the restore see?
The goal is restore the whatever.file to the "correct" place so that
everyone can continue working..
Currently I do all of this with BackupPC, but the auditor requires that
the software be able to perform backup and restore functions that the
"End User" can manipulate with out the use of outside help.
So I am looking if I need to continue with my broken windows software
(which is wrong on many levels) but keeps the auditors content.
Or do I put in the right solution (something with a FreeBSD agent) that
understands and works with symbolic links correctly and properly.
Thank you for taking the time to read this entire email; I look forward
to your responses.
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