Hi there, missed the original post, hope this is interesting:
> >-----------------------
> >Name of your organization (optional, but highly desirable). If you
> > can't tell the name of your employer, maybe you can tell what kind of
> > organization that is, e.g. university, manufacturing company,
> > financial services, government, etc
I'm not going to disclose my employer without permission, but we are
in the managed hosting industry.
> >Any interesting Amanda stories you can tell.
> >For how long have you been using Amanda? (I especially look for
> > examples where people used Amanda for more than a year in production)
Amanda has been in use here for number of years. It was well
entrenched over a year ago when I arrived.
> >What is your current version of Amanda?
Depends on the machine. Debian woody is currently on 2.4.2p2, RHEL is
shipping 2.4.5 with RHEL4 (2.4.4 with RHEL3?) We mostly keep to vendor
distributed versions on clients, though I am exploring the feasability
of upgrading Debian woody machines.
On the servers, I build the software from the latest patch release.
We're running the latest 2.4.5, but looking to upgrade to 2.5.0 soon.
> >What OS do you use for Amanda server?
RHEL 3 and 4.
> >How many Amanda servers do you have?
We have four servers. One uses a fibre-channel attached EMC SAN, the
other three use fibre-channel attached Apple XRaids. All backups are
done to virtual tapes on disk.
> >How many Amanda clients per server do you have? (I especially look for
> >examples with 10+ clients)
It varies somewhat; the server on the EMC box manages dumps for 198
disks on about 75 hosts. The Apple Xraids can handle around 100 disks
on 50 hosts.
> >What operating systems do you backup?
RHEL, Debian, Suse, FreeBSD.
> >What is total amount of data you backup?
Around 5TB, give or take some.
> >Do you use dump or tar and why?
Both, depending on host. Whenever possible we use dump as it's almost
always better at making filesystem images that can be restored under
any circumstances.
However, we have seen a number of host/filesystem combinations that
break dump. Fortunately, on all of these, tar is a happy camper!
> >How often do you do full backups?
Our dumpcycle is 7 days.
> >I am very interested in examples of tape-free implementations of
> > Amanda, where backups are done only to disk.
Are there any specific details you are interested in? We have FC
attached storage for backup/holding space. We create two weeks worth
of virtual tapes and use chg-multi for the tape changer.
I considered moving to chg-disk after reading the latest
documentation, but I seem to recall that restores became more tedious
and so I stuck with chg-multi, which works great.
> >How large is your holding disk?
We use 150GB.
> >How often do you restore files? (on average and what are thy typical
> >scenarios)
Rarely does a week go by and very seldom a month, without a restore.
> >Do you use compression and where (hardware, client or server)?
We use fast client compression to get more hosts done in less time.
> >Do you use encryption and which one?
Not currently, but the upgrade to 2.5.0 is motivated exclusively by
encryption support.
> >How do you backup Windows? (if you have any)
Not Amanda. UltraBac is most common setup. Some clients are using
their own setup.
The inability to backup/restore security labels rules smbclient
backups out.
--
Ross Vandegrift
ross AT kallisti DOT us
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who
make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine
man in the bonds of Hell."
--St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37
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