At 05:01 PM 10/24/02 +0200, Steve Lee wrote:

Hi. I have been using Networker to backup 20 Solaris clients for a few
years. We have one library, do a little manual cloning, a very vanilla
setup. I have been asked to plan for backing up 3,000 windows clients next
year. These are desktops and laptops running 98, 2000, XP.

You might want to look into the Open Source solution "Amanda", which was
written to deal with exactly that kind of problem (backing up the desktop
and laptop computers for all the students at the University of Maryland).

It collects all the backups onto a staging drive on the computer that owns
the tape drive or library, and then dumps that to tape.  This keeps the
tape drive streaming and otherwise optimal, no matter how good or bad the
connection to the computers being backed is.  It also has a fairly
complicated algorithm used to decide whether any given computer should get
a full backup or an incremental, with the goal of spreading the network
load around.

Check http://www.amanda.org for more information.  We use it to back the
servers in our security DMZ, rather than poking holes in our firewall for
Networker.  In our case, a FreeBSD box with an ADIC FastStor library is
used to do the backups.  You could construct something similar for a
thousand bucks or less.  We use Networker on our production network, behind
the firewalls.

No offense to the Legato community, just a suggestion...
        -crl
--
Chad R. Larson (CRL22)    chad AT eldocomp DOT com
  Eldorado Computing, Inc.   602-604-3100
     5353 North 16th Street, Suite 400
       Phoenix, Arizona   85016-3228

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