Re: What is Ideal Backup?
From: Jean-David Beyer (jdbeyer_at_exit109.com)
Date: 05/31/04
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Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 14:01:30 -0400
John-Paul Stewart wrote:
> tom wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I run RH 8.0 and I wonder what backup software should I use to backup my
>> file server on tape. I tried Amanda
>> but I find it very cumbersome. I just got tired trying it and following
>> their vague lengthy documentation.
>
>
> Keep trying things until you find one you like. If you're willing to
> pay for it, there are various commercial offerings you could try. Most
> of them have free 30-day trials or somesuch so you can try before you
> buy. Three that I tried were:
>
> Arkeia (http://www.arkeia.com/) Arkeia Light is available for free
> subject to certain licensing constraints
>
> Storix (http://www.storix.com/) Free personal edition and free 30-day
> trials of licensed software
>
> BRU (http://www.bru.com/) Free 30-day demos of their offerings
I use BRU on my machines. Before that, I used a combination of _find_ and
_cpio_ commands. Both work well. BRU claim to be more reliable than _cpio_
because they write a checksum in every tape block so it is easy to see
whaich blocks are bad (and if any are bad, you may wish to use a new
tape). But the checksum is handy for other things as well. Normally, after
you do a backup with BRU, it rewinds the tape and reads it back to see
that the checksums are all OK. This turns out to be handier than comparing
it with the disk files, since those files have often changed in the
meantime and you get a lot of false alarms that way. I am not positive how
necessary this feature is with the Exabyte VXA drives I have, though, as
they do a read after write check of every tape block anyway (their tape
heads are helical scan, and there are four heads on the drum. When
writing, every other one is used as a playback head to read what was just
written).
Another nice feature is their (free) CRU product that runs with BRU. With
it, you can produce two floppies automatically and a tape from which you
can do a bare metal restore if disaster struck. Just buy new drives or a
whole new machine and boot from the first floppy (which asks for the
second). It will format the drives, make up all the partitions, restore
/dev with your owners and permissions, and everything else.
Nothing stops you from writing similar software, of course, but I would
fear I might have overlooked something I would not discover until too late.
I am not saying BRU is better than Arkeia and Storix, since I have never
used them. And if the two little features I mentionned are not important
to you, I suggest just using find and cpio commands in a shell script run
by cron.
>
> What's best for me is not necessarily what's best for you, so I strongly
> encourage you to try things for yourself---both commercial demos and
> opensource.
You are right there! If the O.P. is an advanced desktop user with a single
machine, one class of solutions is appropriate. If, per contra, he has a
battery of machines doing some kind of 24/7 continuous processing of
nuclear reactor control or oil refinery control, something else would be
more suitable.
>
> FWIW, after trying all three of the above plus Amanda, custom scripts
> wrapped around tar, and various other open source alternatives, I
> settled on BRU. It offered both an intuitive GUI interface (xbru) and a
> command-line interface---the best of both worlds, IMHO. But of course,
> you might find something else to be more intuitive.
I never understood the need for the GUI interface and do not use it. I do
not want to run BRU: I want cron to do it, and it does not care for GUI
interfaces.
-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 13:50:00 up 8 days, 21:05, 3 users, load average: 3.22, 3.15, 2.80
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