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

[Jason Tower]

it may not be exactly what you want, but for bare metal restores nothing 
beats a full system image.  you can either use g4u to image disks or 
partitions to a *nix ftp server, or boot knoppix and use dd/tar over 
ssh.  granted, both of these require powering down the server for as 
long as the backup takes and are manual in nature, but they yield a 
perfect image backup ideal for total bare metal restores.  in 
conjunction with a more lightweight daily backup plan for data 
directories only, this might be useful.

maybe a trilug presentation on "linux backup strategies and techniques" 
would be interesting?  there are scores of linux tools that can be 
employed to backup data in one form or another (tar, dd, ssh/scp, 
rsync, nfs, g4u, etc).  plus dedicated software tools like taper, 
amanda, arkeia, storix, and so on.  not to mention linux raid, LVM, 
tape drives, removable media...

jason

On Friday 19 March 2004 18:52, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> 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