[CentOS] Dump on remote filesystems?

[Les Mikesell]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:

>>> I have a couple C5 systems I want to back up.  My plan is to, one way 
>>> or another, back them up to a C5 machine in my office.  I have samba 
>>> installed on the systems to back up, the machines are mounted on the 
>>> system in my office, and a tape library hanging of the system in my 
>>> office.
>>>
>>> I was hoping to perform a simple /sbin/dump of the remote systems.  I 
>>> put together a script for another successful backup I have going on a 
>>> system with local filesystems.  But for remote filesystems, I get 
>>> errors of File Cannot Be Accessed (//remote_system/subdir) which does 
>>> exist as an smb mounted filesystem.
>>>
>>> I'd use NFS, but I would like a bit more control and some level of 
>>> encryption for the user authentication and data being transferred.
>>>
>>> If a direct dump of remote smb filesystems isn't possible, I may opt 
>>> to have each system perform their own local dumps, then run a script 
>>> locally on the tape-connected machine to dump those local dumps, or 
>>> copy the dumps locally then dump them to tape.
>>>
>>> If nothing else works, I can always install Windows XP and use 
>>> Windows backup program, but I'd really like to try and get this going 
>>> under Linux before going that route.
>>
>> use amanda, www.amanda.org
>>
>> it rocks
> 
> My fundamental question is why dump claims it cannot access what I want 
> it to back up.   What's to say other solutions - Amanda, etc, will work 
> any better?   I want to know how to resolve the source problem before 
> looking into other products.   How will BackupPC or Amanda do any better?

Dump is file-system oriented and won't handle remote-mounted 
directories.  You can use file-oriented tar on remote mounts - or smbtar 
on remote samba/windows shares without mounting them, or use ssh to run 
some command like tar or dump remotely and return the output.

Amanda works by having a remote client do the work and return the backup 
data and can use tar or dump.  Backuppc uses ssh with tar or rsync, or 
smbtar or rsync against a remote copy in daemon mode, thus not needing a 
dedicated remote agent.

Amanda is more tape-oriented, but can also archive to disk.  Backuppc is 
best at archiving to disk (with some clever tricks to reduce the space 
needed) but can also write to tape.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com