[CentOS] Backup Redux

Fri Dec 9 18:11:18 UTC 2011
Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org>

--On Friday, December 09, 2011 11:48:49 AM -0600 Les Mikesell
<lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Errr, what?   Amanda is a little cumbersome to set up, but it doesn't
> bite.  If gnutar works, amanda should work or tell you why.

As I said, it's been at least 8 years since I dealt with Amanda.
Going by memory, though, in the case of Amanda, it wasn't flakiness
but rather limitations.

At the time Amanda had the limitation that the backup of a filesystem
could not span tapes.  This was a critical issue in that I had
filesystems larger than the largest tapes available.  In the case
where filesystem sizes approached the size of a tape, it wasted a
lot of tape space (which wasn't cheap).

I'm willing to believe that they've fixed that limitation, but 
if so I'd already moved on.

Arkeia, though, was definitely one of the flakey ones (IIRC I lost
three months' worth of backups, which was caught by a scheduled
validation process ... luckily it was only history and not current
data that was gone.)

Devin