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