Thanks for your reply, Gene.

On Saturday 01 March 2003 03:38, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri February 28 2003 23:14, Amanda wrote:
> >Does anyone know how to do this?  I'm using 2.4.4, and have read
> > the docs/SAMBA file and see the note about only being able to use
> > "exclude" (not "exclude list") when backing up a windows client
> > using smbclient.
> >
> >Is that the final answer?  Is there no method whatsoever available
> > for excluding more than one file per client machine?
>
> Sure.  AIUI, you can specify a file as the exclude list, and this
> file then contains a list of the files you want to exclude, stated
> in relative (./filename) format. Samba will I believe, translate
> the backslash style of windows pathlist seperator into a forward
> slash as used by the rest of the world, and if the exclude list is
> a local list without translation, then an entry in the list file of
> ./WIN386.SWP should exclude that file.  Similarly another liine
> with an entry of ./SendTo in that same file should cause it (and
> all its subdirs) to be excluded.

Well, no.  That works well for unix machines that run the native amanda 
client, but not for windows machines.  The docs come right out and address 
it in the file "docs/SAMBA" included with the amanda tarball.  When I 
actually try it, amcheck complains about it.

>
> That is of course if I understand it correctly.  I don't have such a
> situation here, and the gotchas of useing samba made an rsync
> believer out of me, so I rsync to a local mirror of the other
> machine, and backup that local directory, which works much better
> than the hit or miss you get because samba doesn't support the
> correct file dating info since it doesn't exist on a M$ box in the
> first place.

Could you be more specific about rsync?  I'm unfamiliar with that program.  
Can you maybe send me a pointer to more information about it?  Maybe I'll 
use it instead of smbclient.  How well does it handle restores?  The file 
"docs/SAMBA" also mentions that restoring from backup to a windows box is 
not ideal as smbclient apparently won't write over read-only files.

I'd love to hear how other folks are backing up windows machines using 
amanda.

Thanks in advance