Recommendations for Commercial Backup packages?

[Paul Lussier]

In a message dated: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 09:49:23 EST
bscott at ntisys.com said:

>On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, at 8:56pm, p.lussier at comcast.net wrote:
>> For small-medium shops you can't beat the price/performance of AMANDA.
>
>  The only problem with Amanda that I have is that it cannot handle a
>filesystem which exceeds the size of your tape drive.  Has this been solved
>yet?  (We've got a client with a 500 GB data store and a robotic tape
>library.)

I've always handled that by splitting the file system up into smaller
chunks by backing up the subdirectories individually (obviously this
requires the use of tar vs. dump).  Doing this means that rather than
a single 500GB file system, you have several 50 or 100GB "file systems".
This is not necessarilly desirable, but it at least makes it do-able.

One thing I've learned from using amanda and watching the mailing list
is that sometimes you just need to be creative :)

>Just in case somebody asks: Yes, we tried GNU tar's multi-volume option.  
>It actually worked pretty well, until we hit a bug: If GNU tar happens to be
>writing a file with a "long file name" when it spans tapes, then the archive
>is corrupted.  (!!!)

I believe this has been fixed, but I'm not positive, I'd ask on the
amanda mailing lists.


Seeya,
Paul
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