If you enjoy beating your head against the wall and cursing, I highly recommend Bacula. :-)

It is incredibly robust but a little odd/confusing/intricate to set up properly. However, once it's working, I've found it is stable and reliable.

Tim Nelson Systems/Network Support Rockbochs Inc. (218)727-4332 x105

----- Original Message ----- From: "Shawn Everett" shawn@tandac.com To: "CentOS mailing list" centos@centos.org Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 9:10:40 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central Subject: Re: [CentOS] enterprise backup solution (probably amanda?)

I think backups are important and always on topic.

You could always use Veritas Netbackup. That's what one of my clients uses with great success. It backups up Windows, Linux and does full, incremental, restores etc etc all from a nice Java GUI.

It's $$$ but you can't get more Enterprise than that. ;)

Shawn

On Wednesday 30 July 2008, David Hláčik wrote:

Hello guys,

hope i am not making an offtopic

Currently we are looking for storage/backup solution in our company.

Basically we need to backup data incrementaly from windows server and centos server + subversion repositories.

So far i believe amanda would be best for this situation and also has good reference.

Is there anything else - i would be glad to have space for research and choose backuping solution which fits for my needs best.

Thanks in advance!

David

_______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 12:19 PM, David Mackintosh < David.Mackintosh@xdroop.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 07:10:40AM -0700, Shawn Everett wrote:

...

I think backups are important and always on topic.

You could always use Veritas Netbackup. That's what one of my clients

uses

...

with great success. It backups up Windows, Linux and does full, incremental, restores etc etc all from a nice Java GUI.

It's $$$ but you can't get more Enterprise than that. ;)

Agreed on Veritas NetBackup. An oddly constructed tool, but one we've come to depend on.

We also have customers who use Bakbone NetVault. It's broken in different ways than the Veritas NetBackup is. :)

-- /\oo/\ / /()\ \ David Mackintosh | dave@xdroop.com | http://www.xdroop.com

Check out bacula.org. It's very good and scalable.

If a disk based archive will work, backuppc ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) is fairly painless and it's scheme of compression and hardlinking duplicates lets you keep about 10x the history you'd expect. If you need offsite copies you'll have to run an independent instance elsewhere or come up with a clever scheme to copy the disk though. The massive number of hardlinks it creates makes it difficult to use normal methods to copy the archive partition.

We use backuppc in production. It has awesome compression, and a great web gui that you can use to restore individual files or file trees. I have even used it on occasion to rebuild an entire Linux server from bare metal (I had to install the base OS first, but it worked!)

As Les mentioned, due to the huge number of files and hard links you will run into problems copying the backuppc files off to tape or external USB drive if you try to use rsync or cp for this. Depending on the amount of data you are working with, you might whip up a script that unmounts your backuppc storage partition, and images the entire thing to an external media with dd_rescue.

Joseph L. Casale wrote:

...

I'm an Amanda user since 9+ years now. Done several restores, even bare metal ones. Amanda never failed on me.

Paul, I bought the Enterprise version of Amanda and was blown away to find it cant do a verify of a backup once completed. You can verify the contents of a single tape manually, but I thought that was a bit of an oversight!

Do you guys just trust what you hope was written to tape to be ok, or how do you verify backups?

There is the command "amverify", which you can run just after a backup or even a few weeks later, when you believe a tape has gone bad.

But, indeed, that command verifies only to some depth. For gnutar dumptypes, it pipes the backup image into gnutar to verify, but for "dump" dumptypes, this cannot be generalized, because the server OS does not necessarily has a compatible "restore" program (your client could be a Solaris with ufsdump, while your server could be a Linux without ufsrestore/ufsdump). In that case the amverify command limits itself to verify if the bytes can be read from tape without errors, and uncompressed without errors if the image had software compression enabled.

Adding checksum verification is currently work in progress.

Of course, tapes can fall on the ground, and get damaged, after being verified, so, if you really really want more certainty to be able to restore, there is the RAIT support in Amanda, where you can mirror (2 tapes), or write a N tapes with one parity (N-1 tapes + 1 parity) in parallel. Now, you can loose a tape, and still be able to restore.

I even ran a RAIT-mirror with one virtual-tape-on-disk (for easy and fast restores) and one real physical tape (stored offsite for security) for some time. Worked very well.

When there are errors DURING a tape write Amanda will notice, unless your hardware does not detect those. Tapedrives actually have a read-after-write head, that verify the bits that were written microseconds before -- if you don't trust those, buy another tapedrive from another manufacturer.

One of the frequent errors "competitive" backup programs make is, that they close() after each image (or even a partial chunk), and then reopen the tapedrive again to write the next image. The current version of Amanda does not even allow appends to tape, just to avoid this, because in the small time between the close and open, there is a chance that e.g. the scsi subsystem gets reset, and the tape rewound. Amanda would have noticed any error here. Otherwise you need indeed a verify pass to notice that kind of errors.

As long as I use Amanda, however, I did indeed not have got any tape that got zero errors while writing, but was unreadable afterwards. Maybe I was just lucky.

The feature I miss most in Amanda is the rsync-like stuff. That's why I use BackupPC for our MS Windows Clients, mostly laptops (using rsyncd), and rdiff-backup (rsync with history) for the remote backups over a slow link.

-- Paul