On Friday, March 14, 2008 11:12 PM -0500 Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
If you want something easier and can live with disk based backups instead of tape, look at backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/). I still run amanda because I set it up about 10 years ago and never have to do anything but change the tapes, but I take the tapes offsite and would only restore from them after a disaster. For day-to-day stuff it is much easier to grab a copy or do a restore from the on-line web interface of backuppc.
I combine this with dump to an external USB drive. I stop the BackupPC service during the dump to idle the system. If you use LVM, you could instead generate a filesystem snapshot and dump that. (I didn't know about the snapshot feature until I'd already installed CentOS 5 and it used the whole partition for the volume.)