On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 07:44:31AM -0500, Neil wrote:
> Good day guys, 
> 
> What is amanda's approach to backup commercial software like Microsoft 
> Exchange 5.5 mail server? It's because in Exchange, they have this public 
> store and private store files. Commercial backup such as BackupExec can 
> backup/restore each mailboxes via agents. 
> 
> Will there be any future path that Amanda is looking into? Or is Amanda is 
> just really looking into perfecting back up of unix filesystem? I also 
> heard that backing up registry of the Windows Oses is a bit crappy at the 
> moment. 
> Any comments will be greatly appreciated. 


First, amanda doesn't backup anything.  It manages backups.

Using your terminology from above, amanda uses "agents" to do the
actual backing up.  The common agents that amanda uses are gnutar
and various unix "dump-style" programs.

Amanda was developed on unix, with no intention to deal with
non-unix systems.  IIRC, the only reason that amanda started 
doing windows (pun intended) was that the freeware package,
samba, included a gnutar-like capability, which could pull
files from a windows host to a unix host.

As a manager, amanda just schedules and runs these "agents".
Any capabilities and particularly any deficiencies, are those
of the agents.

For example, gnutar, backing up unix systems has undesireable
affects on file time stamps.  Dump-style programs have limitations
of only doing incrementals on entire file systems.  Samba has
limitations of ...

You get what you pay for.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)