[TriLUG] Tabling at RARSfest and DurhamFest, interest in Amanda demo on tape loader ?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Speaking of Amanda...  can anyone on the list comment on practical 
experiences of backing up Windows machines w/ Amanda?  I have done some 
cursory research (with more done by my counterpart at work who handles 
more of the Winders specific admin stuff) into ways to do complete 
backup and bare-metal restore of a Win2k Server.  The Amanda project has 
available "nttar" which seems like a good solution on the surface for 
handling backup and restore.  It's strong point is that it allows for 
backup and restore of full NTFS file permissions, and it works nicely 
from a command line in a traditional UNIXy fashion.  The places I have 
found it lacking are it's inability to backup the registry in a safe 
fashion - ala ntbackup's ability to dump the "System State".  It also 
writes to it's own native output format (not tar as one might at first 
believe), which is a minor but forgivable concern.  You could of course 
get around this by dumping the system state with ntbackup to a file 
right before you fire off the nttar backup, but that still leaves 
ntbackup in the picture (which is, in my humble experience, 
_ridiculously_ unreliable, especially if called from a command line 
interface).

So I suppose to summarize, what backup and restore solutions for Windows 
- that are call-able from (and store-able on) a *NIX platform, do TriLUG 
members have positive experiences with?

My advance apologies to the anti-MS among us, if this strays a bit far 
from a Linux topic.  :)

Aaron J.


Mark W4CHL wrote:

>Dear TriLUG,
>
>I have seen a number of Trilug people at the RARSfest (coming up on 4April) and the Cary Hamfest (July) as well as the DurhamFest (May). For this year, is there anyone on the list interested in working up a demo of the backup/recovery tools from Amanda.org ?  
>
>I have a Seagate AIT-2 tape autoloader with a twin currently about to be installed for use at the Community Church of Chapel Hill (can send a PDF summary if interested).  I thought that perhaps a demo of a Linux server running Amanda back-end services with a Window$ and/or Linux client attached might be of interest to some of the attendees at the hamfests. 
>
>A simple tape drive on the backup server would suffice to demonstrate the idea, but I thought perhaps use of an Autoloader ("tape robot") in the demo might catch a bit more attention.  Heaven knows many hams run multiple PCs in their ham shacks, and I wonder how many of them have a well thought out backup/recovery strategy ?  
>
>If there is interest, please post and let's see if we can coordinate activities. 
>
>Cheers & 73 de Mark W4CHL
>
>Mark R. Smith  Chapel Hill, NC 
>http://rtpnet.org/parc
>  
>