FC 2/3 Backup

[Nigel Wade]

Craig White wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 12:22 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 10:54, Tim Holmes wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Charles -- I am more than willing to try anything at this point,
>>>however, I am new to linux, and so I will need a little guidance getting
>>>through the process that you described (having cron tarbal the files and
>>>move them) -- it sounds like a valid plan, I am just gonna need some
>>>help getting it done.  
>>>
>>>As far as Amanda -- I have seen it when doing installs, but I know
>>>nothing about it,  is it a backup server or a remote client,  any other
>>>info would be appreciated
>>
>>Amanda generally wants to write directly to a tape drive on the machine
>>running the server.  If you are interested in an on-line disk based
>>solution, look at backuppc:  http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
> 
> ----
> Amanada has both a client and server application. Thus on the computer
> that has the tape drive, it would need both. Any other system would only
> need the client. Apparently there is a version in CVS that backs up to
> filesystem and judging by my experience with Amanda, they are likely to
> do a very good job at that. I don't believe that the version distributed
> with Fedora 3 will do that though.
> 
> Craig
> 

I'm running amanda 2.4.4p2 on FC2 and it backs up to disk just fine. It's 
backing up RH9, FC1 and FC2 clients. It supports virtual tapes on disk, but 
requires a fair amount of manual configuration for the "tape changer".

It's a hairy-scary backup solution if you are used to a "real" backup 
system, though. It has it's idiosyncracies, but once you get it setup you 
can leave it to get on with it. I've not touched the setup in the past 6 
months, it just silently backs-up the clients every night to a 250GB USB 
drive. I wouldn't want to have to re-build a system from bare-metal using an 
Amanda backup though.

-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555