Hello Paul,
Hello Stefan,

If I am in trouble, I will send an email to this list.

Solong thx for your advice.

ciao Andreas

Paul Bijnens wrote:

Andreas Moser wrote:

my english is not quite perfect but i will do my best

Wow, you spelled "quite" correct, that's more than I usually do. :-)

We use 7 Windows PC's and one Linux SuSE 8.2 PC.
Every PC has some Windows Shares, which i want to backup.

Most installations I know use samba-backups in a Unix-world where the
existing configuration and tape drives can be used to backup some
additional Windows shares.

I do it, and it works too.  I have currently 6 PC-clients with a total
of 14 shares containing about 20 Gbyte data.

The disadvantages of using samba are:
- it works only good for data files; no registry, but you can
  dump the registry in a file, and take that file in the backup
- it cannot backup open files; no provisions builtin to backup e.g.
  exchange server databases, etc.  (Note: many native Windows backup
  programs have the same limitation!)
- you cannot backup the pc, and use that backup to do a bare metal
  restore of the pc in case of a harddisk crash (same remark as above)
- there needs to be one or more unix/linux servers running smbclient
  who actually do the backup (and software compression if you use it).
  Amanda can do multiple backups in parallel, but avoids to overload
  one client.  In the Windows share case, it is actually the computer
  running smbclient that is the client for samba.  You need to tweek
  a little more inside amanda to run multiple smbclients at once
  (maxdumps in the dumptype, choosing fake "spindlenumbers" in disklist)
  In your case that computer is the amanda server itself. You need
  lots of CPU-power if you want do software compression too.
- I forgot the other items...

But yes, it works. I use it.
I must confess, I press hard to setup the computers differently.
Instead of having a local share, I set the share on a Samba server.
Some users don't notice the difference.