I have an Overland Arcvault tape library, a CentOS 5 box, a Windows XP system, and RAID box that supports NFS and CIFS.
The RAID box is remotely located and acts as central file storage.
I might normally use dump to perform backups, but as was learned here, and on dump's man page, dump doesn't support remote file systems such as NFS or CIFS.
So, for now, I've connected the library to a Windows XP system, running Service Pack 2. I have a shell script that tar gz's the directories of choice to preserve, places them in /backup, and, via samba's config of making /backup available, have it mounted as a drive letter on the XP system. I'm then using XP's built-in backup/restore program to store the contents of /backup to tape, and that is working fine for now.
Is there a reliable Linux/CentOS-based way to do this, too? I know people keep saying use Amanda and/or bacula and be done with it, but in the event something goes wrong and the mysql, etc database gets corrupt, and people want their data back, it would be much easier to use a readily-available command, like cpio, tar, etc, to do the job.
I've also elected to tar gz the contents ahead of time, for if I were to try and directly archive some of the files via a CIFS mount, I've experienced permission problems with various files and folders. A local tar of the files has gotten around that, then just have the Windows box copy the tar files to tape.
Now to see what options tar has for producing incremental backups with a cron'ed tar job, unless someone has a better, comparable approach with existing OS tools (tar, cpio, dump, etc).
I want to retain as many permissions as possible. I've tried rsync before, but that also requires enough disk space for the file copying, and some of the options I've used have complains of proper permissions being kept during the process.
Thanks again.
Scott