> I thought I had read that NDMP clients can now act like true Networker

> clients, transferring data over the network to the storage node. (Back

> when I last looked at NDMP, it was a local tape only protocol I
believe)

NDMP can be used in four ways:
Filer to self 
  Locally attached tape drive
Filer to filer 
  Filer backing up across the network to another filer's tape drive
Filer to server
  Filer backing up across the LAN to your NetWorker server
Server to filer
  Regular NW client sending it's backups to a filer (no thanks)

What most people use NDMP for is the locally attached method (filer to
self), as that's where the big advantage is.  If you're going to do NDMP
across the network, it's probably faster/easier to just backup via
NFS/CIFS.  But if you want to use NW to back up to locally attached tape
drives on your filers, you have to use NDMP to back up to them.

> Is there still a choice between tar and dump here? Is this in place of

> Networker's uasm format or something?

That is up to the filer vendor, as NDMP doesn't specify the format.
It's only a communication protocol, not a backup protocol.  NetApp uses
dump.  Other vendors use tar or cpio.  EMC apparently allows you to
choose dump or tar.

Whichever format they choose, though, they all hack it in a different
way to support Windows ACLs.  So even if you choose dump on EMC, you
won't be able to restore it via NDMP to a NetApp.  The dumps are
different, and so are all the other formats.

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