General backup advice help?


Hello list,

I've been lurking on the list a few days (not really long enough to beopening my mouth, but here it goes).

I am a relatively novice sysadmin looking for a better backup setup thanour handcrafted scripts. Amanda looks interesting but I am worried thatit will not necessarily solve my problem. So I was hoping to beg yourindulgence for a moment and see if anyone has any advice for me.

My main concern is that we have to be "up" round the clock these days aswe have people connecting during their work day, 9 hours different fromours. So having major services disrupted in the middle of the night forbackups doesn't seem a viable solution anymore, as it hits the otherpeople in the middle of the day.

We are a small business. We have 2 main linux servers each with about200G to back up. Backing up a full 200G volume across the network takesabout 7 hours currently.

I understand from the documentation that Amanda will attempt to balancethe time taken for backups through its scheduling process. However, itseems to me that when you have to do a level 0 of size X, you have to doit, and so you will take the full 7 hours.

The bad news is that currently these systems are set up with the full200G on single partitions.


Does anyone have any advice for these problems?

1) reducing the time for large volume network backups - is it possibleto do less than a full partition?2) reducing the system resources on systems backing up (i.e. can theamanda-client be run with a low priority)?3) can you tell that we're "just screwed" and need to seriously rethinkhow we do this? If so, got any ideas? :)

Again, sorry for the generic, non-Amanda-specific questions. If anyonehas suggestions for the right forum to ask these questions on, I wouldlove to hear from them.


Thanks,
Don