On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 03:19:58PM +0200, Uwe Beger wrote:
> All my important win boxes (actually only Win2K) do a standard M$ backup on 
> a samba share, which is backed up by amanda.
> Advantages: immediate recovery possible
> Disadv.: disk space

BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html) looks like
a possible replacement for MS backup for the first phase of this
scheme.

It looks as though it could save a lot of disk space compared to
MS backup, since it optimizes multiple identical copies of a file
into a single copy on the backup disk.  So for backing up a
cluster of Windows boxes, you'd only need backup-disk space for
one copy of Windows, not N.  (Same principle could apply to other
O/S's of course, and indeed BackupPC says it works on Linux too.
Not sure about other Unices...)

For the same reason, it'd also save huge amounts of tape.  You
wouldn't be plopping modified multi-gigabyte backup archives into
your spool every night, most of whose contents were identical to
the previous night's.

As I say, it looks cool (and GPL too!) but I've never tried it.
Does anyone here have any experience with it?  (Well, someone
must, since it got a mention in Jon's survey.)  What do you think
of it?

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
        - Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot