Tar/Star Backup in heterogenous Network and Volume management - Advice needed!

Hi,

As a system administrator i was given an assignment to find alternative
Backup methods for making Full and Differential Backups.
We got a Windows Network here (NT4 at the moment, moving to 2003 Server
later this year) with a few Linux boxes connected. My idea was using a
Linux Machine as Storage Machine for our Backups. Backups are beeing made
almost every Day(Mon-Fri Differential, Sa Full Backup).
For keeping the acl permissions, i guess star is the right joice.
I did some testing backup cycles and they went fine.
Only Problem i got is Volume-Management. While its possible to decompress
the tgz files and recover single or all files of a volume with winzip,
the size of the volumes might become a problem, since a full backup takes
up about 60GB and a Differential about 10GB.
I am able to open the tgz or tar.gz file with winzip and find the .tar
file inside, but every time i open the tar file contained winzip starts to
decompress the file before opening it. This is not a problem with 100MB
Archives but will be as soon as i try to open a 60GB tgz file.
Should i stick with commercial backup solutions like Veritas Backup exec,
or is there a Solution to this Problem?

THX in Advance,

GG

Gurr Gurr <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Should i stick with commercial backup solutions like Veritas Backup exec,
> or is there a Solution to this Problem?

I'd suggest checking out Bacula, http://www.bacula.org/ I've been using it
for a couple of months, and it's *very* nice.

--
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu
WPI Network Engineer
GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:16:44 +0000, Frank Sweetser wrote:

> Gurr Gurr <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Should i stick with commercial backup solutions like Veritas Backup exec,
>> or is there a Solution to this Problem?
>
> I'd suggest checking out Bacula, http://www.bacula.org/ I've been using it
> for a couple of months, and it's *very* nice.

There's a crowd that are using amanda, from the U of Maryland:

http://www.amanda.org/

It's been around for quite a while (decade?) and can handle many/most
environments. Have not seen (nor searched, admittedly) comparison between
bacula & amanda. Looking at amanda now, for use with tape library.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.

Juhan Leemet <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> There's a crowd that are using amanda, from the U of Maryland:
>
> http://www.amanda.org/
>
> It's been around for quite a while (decade?) and can handle many/most
> environments. Have not seen (nor searched, admittedly) comparison between
> bacula & amanda. Looking at amanda now, for use with tape library.

The biggest reason that we went with bacula instead of amanda, is that (the
last time I looked, anyway) amanda couldn't handle backing up a volume to
multiple tapes. So if you had a single volume with 100G of data on it, you
couldn't back it up to two 50G tapes. Bacula can do so.

That, and it's got excellent support built in for tape changes, including ones
with bar code readers.

http://www.bacula.org/html-manual/state.html has a good feature list.

--
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu
WPI Network Engineer
GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:47:57 +0000, Frank Sweetser wrote:
> Juhan Leemet <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> There's a crowd that are using amanda, from the U of Maryland:
>>
>> http://www.amanda.org/
>>
>> It's been around for quite a while (decade?) and can handle many/most
>> environments. Have not seen (nor searched, admittedly) comparison between
>> bacula & amanda. Looking at amanda now, for use with tape library.
>
> The biggest reason that we went with bacula instead of amanda, is that (the
> last time I looked, anyway) amanda couldn't handle backing up a volume to
> multiple tapes. So if you had a single volume with 100G of data on it, you
> couldn't back it up to two 50G tapes. Bacula can do so.

OK, that's a good point. I am using EXB-8505xls tape drives which do
7/14GB per tape. My biggest RAID is 70GB and I have some drives with 36GB
and 50GB. I have been using ufsdump for the Solaris disks, and that knows
how to span tapes. Haven't figured how to coordinate and automate the
EXB-210 changer with it though. My plan was to do periodic full dumps
using my own scripts, driving ufsdump, et al. Then use amanda to manage
all my incremental backups, until I decide to do another full dump. Most
of my stuff is slow growth anyway. Lots of historical reference stuff.

> That, and it's got excellent support built in for tape changes, including ones
> with bar code readers.
>
> http://www.bacula.org/html-manual/state.html has a good feature list.

Thanks, I'll definitely have a look at it. Might change my mind/plan.

p.s. Amanda is supposed to be able to use mtx. I have that working for the
changer on Solaris. Haven't tried Linux. Most of my SCSI is on Solaris.

BTW, do you also backup any Windoze partitions? using Samba? other?

While I'm mercilessly picking your brains: any good backup to CDR? I would
like to write mountable (partial) directory structures, not big tar files.
I've come to the conclusion that I'll have to craft my own scripts? Still
considering CDR, since media costs (and drives) for DVD are still too high.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.