On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Neil wrote:

> 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

Jon's reply is a good description of amanda itself.  Haven't checked
into it yet but I've heard there's another project at sourceforge
that's working on a native windows client for amanda.  It may well be
better than doing the samba thing.

> 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.

Well as Jon pointed out amanda isn't perfecting any filesystem's backup.
That's the filesystem maintainer's job.  Amanda just wants to make it
easier for you to run backups so you can spend more time doing something
else.  Those of us wanting to backup fs's and db's that amanda doesn't
already do are building bridges between amanda's architecture and the
backup tools used by the things we want to backup.

Registry backup is a challenge for most windows backup schemes.  There
is a tool somewhere (sorry, don't recall the name) that will snapshot
the registry into a quiescent file.  If you want to get a good backup
of the registry, find this tool and schedule it to run before your
backup starts.  Then backup the registry dump file.  This is pretty much
the same scheme used to backup most any database regardless of OS.

-Mitch