I'm needing to backup a Windows 2K server that has a large 46+GB shared 'D$' 
drive. This disk contains an application that has many little files and even 
under the best circumstances with purchased backup software it will take 30 to 
36 hours to backup. I've managed to get this to 21 hours using a combination of 
Amanda-2.4.4, Samba-2.2.8a, and gnutar-1.13.25 to back up this beast. However, 
this is still not good enough (for management, of course). In searching the 
amanda-users and amanda-hackers archives, I found  some mention of modifing 
sendsize.c to use calcsize for estimations. I don't really want to do this as 
it only effects the estimation phase for planner. I was hoping to use include 
or exclude options of gnutar but samba will not really play well in this game. 
I tried to divide the large shared drive into directories using the include 
option in both the disklist and in the dumptypes. Samba complains about this 
and gives error messages and quits. Then I tried using ex!
 clude. Samba will be ok with this option as long as you just exclude only one 
file or directory. This is not a good option either as I have many files or 
patterns I want to exclude (i.e.,./pagefile.sys, */*.tmp, or */*.zip).
So, I thought of installing cygwin on this W2K machine with amanda client and 
trying this configuration. I am working through this implementation currently 
and am having some problems (I did get the host server to talk to the w2k, 
cygwin, amanda client machine, but had to stop at this point and got pulled off 
onto another project). My thought was I could at least bypass Samba and just 
use gnutar to backup the W2K client machine using exclude lists or files. Has 
anyone done this or something similar?
If so, can you give me some advice on the best way to accomplish my objective - 
backing up large W2K shared partitions in the shortest time possible. 
Thanks in advance.
Bob...

--
Robert Zahn     UNIX Systems Administrator
Oklahoma City Community College
7777 S. May Avenue
Oklahoma City, Ok 73159
bzahn AT zeus.okccc DOT edu    bzahn AT okccc DOT edu
--