Which is the correct way to backup windows servers using amanda? Is ther

Which is the correct way to backup windows servers using amanda? Isthere one?

First of all, I think this must have been discussed a lot of times onthe list - probably. Unfortunately, I did not have much luck searchingthe archives, only random single statements -

We are running amanda for years now. For us, backup of windows serversis a non-issue because we don't have production win servers. However, acustomer of us has several such servers. Backup is done through a debiansarge linux server using amanda and SMB (samba 3).

Recently, they has a headcrash on a non-mirrored disk and the tapes wereneeded. As it turned out, all backups of the windows servers wereincomplete. smbclient thought 70-80 files per directory must be enough.At backup time, it just went ahead to the next directory, and whenever adirectory contained more than this many files, they were simply ignoredwithout any warning or error message.

The result is massive data loss. (Professional hardware data recoveryfailed.)

We installed a samba update on the debian sarge server. Now, more filesmake it to the tape, but some other bug in smbclient makes it fail afterit has run for a certain time. We have no clue why, but it would startto write bad filenames to the tar archive with repeated equal names anddozends of empty files... we came to the conclusion that smbclient itnot the correct way to do backups. At least not for the data volume inquestion (~50 GByte compressed, > 100,000 files).

Now the question: How do folks make backups of windows servers? Iscygwin a real solution - or is it just a hack as well? Does the nativeWin32 amanda client ("beta") on sourceforge work? Or are you usingnative windows backup software with its own tape drive?


Thanks for any hints!
Moritz


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Moritz Both
aldebaran Daten- und Kommunikationssysteme GmbH
Im Moore 26, 30167 Hannover
Tel. +49 511 270 41 60  http://www.aldebaran.de
Fax  +49 511 270 41 6 33

Which is the correct way to backup windows servers using amanda? Is there one?