On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 12:42:49PM +0000, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> "Dr. David Kirkby" wrote:
> > 
> > Can anyone tell me if they use amanda and are a large commercial company
> > (> 250 employees), a hospital or a university and if so how much it's
> > used (whole institution, small department, single server etc). How many

   [[ snip ]]

> However, as I said, I am not in the computer support group and have no
> control over how backups are performed. ...
> 
> I might look at amanda for my home machine, although I'm tempted to
> leave well along with my odd unix scripts run from cron. I've never had
> a major catastropy (disk failure, # rm -rf / or similar) but whenever I

Leaving the current system intact, you could still investigate amanda
at home.  There is nothing that says you have to install a cron entry
to do regular backups.  You can install the system and check its
functioning by simply doing "amdump <config>".  This is the way,
four or five years ago, I explored amanda before recommending it
to a client who wanted to get rid of Veritas.

When the client said "freeware?  maybe, we'll see", I surreptitiously
installed amanda using a different, smaller tape drive than was in
use for Veritas.  A month later they had a recovery need that the
Veritas support person was having trouble with.  After a bit I
recovered the files to an empty directory tree and reported I had
them; they could copy them over if they wanted.  An hour later they
did.  Veritas was gone at the end of the support contract.

For archiving I have a separate config that I still run manually
when the muse stikes, a major change is planned, etc.  Particularly
when using tar for backup, it need not affect other backup schemes.
(dump may affect /etc/dumpdates for other schemes)

jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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