Date: 05 Jan 2003 23:00:40 -0500 From: Benjamin Lewis <bhlewis@wossname.net> To: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> Cc: Tim <tim@sleepy.wojomedia.com>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Backup Solutions Message-ID: <1041825639.793.65.camel@akira.wossname.net> In-Reply-To: <a05200f05ba3d77f8f699@[10.0.1.3]> References: <3E0DC536.8010001@slaudiovis.org> <3E0EBC49.86AD7E28@mindspring.com> <a05200f09ba3573361365@[10.0.1.5]> <3E0FF119.7792A270@mindspring.com> <a05200f0cba3853b5bcaf@[10.0.1.5]> <20030101124419.GA14165@sleepy.wojomedia.com> <a05200f01ba3d46e475cd@[10.0.1.3]> <20030105051402.GA2710@sleepy.wojomedia.com> <a05200f05ba3d77f8f699@[10.0.1.3]>
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On Sun, 2003-01-05 at 00:52, Brad Knowles wrote: > At 11:14 PM -0600 2003/01/04, Tim wrote: > > >> In what way? How does it keep a library of what tape is used for > >> what content? Amanda keeps indexes that detail exactly what content is on which tape. If you need to recover a specific file or an entire filesystem, Amanda will tell you which tapes will need to be loaded. > > > > RTFM at www.amanda.org. > > There doesn't appear to be much of anything useful there. Nor at > <http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda/>. There's a tarball, but > not much more. > Terry Lambert already pointed you to the "chapter" at backupcentral.com: http://www.backupcentral.com/amanda-1.html > > >> How does it keep track of how many times a particular > >> tape has been used, so that you know when it should be retired? > > > > This has nothing to do stackers and libraries. Even if you have a > > single drive, you might want this ability anyway. I don't recall off > > the top of my head whether Amanda does this - it's certainly trivial > > to add a small script to look at the tape usage everyday and make > > this computation, if Amanda doesn't do this already. > > No, I submit that these things do have to do with stackers and > libraries. It doesn't do you much good to use a stacker if the only > support is "eject this tape and give me the next one" when you get to > the end of the stack of tapes, and all the ones that have been > ejected so far have fallen onto the floor. A backup system requires > more intelligence regarding tape management. Amanda will use any tape library or stacker that the OS can talk to. We're relatively lucky on FreeBSD because the chio and mt programs are included in the default install (although the ch driver isn't included in GENERIC kernels before 5.0). The third-party tape drive/ media changer controller "mtx" is also available (/usr/ports/misc/mtx). Amanda includes support for media changers by calling a specified changer script/program when it needs to load or unload a tape. Included in the distribution are several different changers; one talks directly to a SCSI media changer using the passthrough device (chg-scsi),one uses mtx (chg-mtx), and there is one for chio (chg-chio) but I'm not altogether certain that it works correctly. I have used chg-scsi and chg-mtx in the past. At the moment I'm using one that I wrote that uses chio to control my Q7. In the past, I also used a self-written changer to talk to an ancient carousel changer over an RS232 connection. Writing a changer script is quite simple if need be; usually the supplied scripts are sufficient (I only wrote the one I'm using now for the fun of it). The changer scripts/programs themselves can take care of usage counts, auto-cleaning, etc. I believe several of the supplied scripts do take care of cleaning the drive every N tape loads but I don't think any of them worry about the number of times a particular tape has been loaded. Of course, one is free to add any functionality one wants! As for backing up Windows systems, I think you misunderstood why Terry referred to Samba. Amanda can use smbclient to dump a tar file of a share on a Windows box (like smbtar). I've used that in the past and frankly find it less than optimal -- the dump takes a long time and is prone to failures. I have also used the amanda-win32 and the latest version seems to work pretty well. Someone has posted to one of the Amanda mailing lists that he was able to get Amanda to compile (and work) under Cygwin but hasn't posted the patches just yet. However, since you refer to laptops and wireless VPN connections, etc., I would recommend that you just use the native Windows backup tools to dump a backup file onto a Samba share on a Unix box that Amanda can back up normally. For Mac OS X: someone posted patches this past week to get Amanda working with gnutar on OS X. Various others had reported success in the past but those are the first actual patches that I've seen. At this point, there is only one reason that I might hesitate to recommend Amanda to anyone with a little Unix experience: it cannot span a single backup image over more than one tape. It can use more than one tape during a backup *run*, but if any of the backups is larger than the tape the backup will fail. At work we use Amanda extensively and we're just careful about keeping filesystems smaller than tapes (or else buying drives with higher capacity) but if you've got a bunch of 80gig drives and only a 4mm tape drive then you're likely to hit this restriction big time. -Ben -- Benjamin Lewis <bhlewis@wossname.net> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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