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Backup tool?

H

Hyperblaze

Lifer
Can anyone here recommend a backup tool?

Right now I'm looking and reading up on amanda (www.amanda.org) but in case there are better ones out there, I don't want to miss out on getting informed.

 
well that all depends on what you want it to do? are you looking to backup files on your windows desktop? windows has a built in backup utility, also what are you backing up to and how often? if its just a home desktop computer id recomend getting a 300 gig hd or so and installing that as a dedicated data drive and copying all your ****** to that....my 2 cents
 
naaa....this is in a company server room based environment

I'd also like to mention that it's a mixed environment (Linux, Windows, and soon to be FreeBSD)
 
Most people that I know just use tar (or dump on commercial unixes, but avoid it on Linux except for xfs_dump if you're using XFS) on the local box. Does each box have it's own tape drive or are you going to attempt network backups?
 
yea, you sort of need to give us an idea of what you need to backup, how you want to store the backups and the size of the data you are looking to backup. I could give you like a million ways to back things up. But 999,999 will be wrong for your situation.
 
if you need heavy lifting, use Veritas NetBackup.

Backup exec is kinda nice for smaller stuff, but there are probably cheaper/better solutions at that level.

What ever you do, don't let price be the major factor in your decision. Skimp elsewhere, but not on disaster recovery.
 
Well...
I'm fond of using True Image for backing up. It works under Windows-family systems but supports almost all Linux file systems (IMHO the most complete list of supported file systems among this class of software). So you will be able to operate with Linux partitions. And it can backup both files and folders and the whole partitions.
It seems it has Server Version - check on their site www.acronis.com.
 
Yeah, we need more info about his environment.

When I think server room I think 200 servers. True Image isn't gonna work well for that despite how good the product is.
 
We use Veritas NetBackup on a handful of hosted Linux servers and while I don't have any direct experiences with it I hear our unix admin complaining about it all of the time. It's so easy to restore a Linux system from tape using tar and a rescue CD I don't see why you'd want to pay for one of those crap 'enterprise solutions'.
 
The enterprise solutions allow:

1. A backup without knowing what tape. It pulls from a pool and manages the pool.
2. FAST backups to arrays of tapes. Get 200 servers in a room and it's going to take some serious throughput to get backups completed during a maintenance window.

It may be easy to restore using tape+rescue CD but keeping track of which tape to restore is where the big enterprise solutions come in. Multiple servers, multiple backup schedules, multiple tapes per backup = man hours to track that crap if you don't have the right software.

If you just have a handful of servers, yeah netbackup might not be for you. heck for a handful (<10) use ntbackup on windows and tar or something on *nix.
 
1. A backup without knowing what tape. It pulls from a pool and manages the pool.
2. FAST backups to arrays of tapes. Get 200 servers in a room and it's going to take some serious throughput to get backups completed during a maintenance window.
Click to expand...

1. We have very few autoloaders and all of our tapes are manually labeled AFAIK. But one of the autoloaders is attached to 2 Linux boxes and we have a custom script that manages the media. The only gotcha was the the autoloader doesn't take kindly to being issued commands from one box while an operation from the other is happening so we had to add some locking to the scripts.

2. Nearly all of our servers have a dedicated tape drive on them and most of them fit onto one SDLT at the most. There exceptions for the NetWare fileservers and SAN controllers, but they're the minority. So all of our backups run at pretty much the same time with no resource competition.

It may be easy to restore using tape+rescue CD but keeping track of which tape to restore is where the big enterprise solutions come in. Multiple servers, multiple backup schedules, multiple tapes per backup = man hours to track that crap if you don't have the right software.
Click to expand...

All of our tapes are physically labeled in a rack. We rotate a month or so and send 1 full backup off site at the beginning of each month. It's not too hard to figure out which tape was last used for which server.
 
yeah, netbackup wouldn't make much sense for you, Nothin.

The last place I used it had:

~250-300 servers, Sun, hp, linux, and windows
Several had half a terabyte or so of local storage
SAN with a few terabytes of data
Robotic tape library with hundreds of tapes (not sure exactly...whole thing was the size of about 4 typical office cubicles and 6ft high)
~10-20 tape drives

A daily offsite run was over a hundred tapes. Netbackup would pretty much just spit the right ones out and the operator would send em offsite. It would also print a list of tapes that needed to come back from offsite for reuse.

Absolutely impossible to accomplish this with scripting and some autoloaders. This is what enterprise backup software is for.
 
Absolutely impossible to accomplish this with scripting and some autoloaders. This is what enterprise backup software is for.
Click to expand...

That's what most enterprise software is for, charging you out the ass for simple software that locks you into some vendor and makes an unmanagable situation not seem so bad. It's really sad and funny at the same time, most enterprise software that I've seen is usually pretty simple things that could be done by a semi-competent programmer in a few months and yet these people put a fancy salesman on the front of it and charge $25,000 a license and $5,000 a year in maintenance. Kinda makes me wish I had become a niche software developer.

I actually don't know how the backups of our SAN are handled, I'm guessing that they use a method similar to the one used by the servers. Also guessing, but it has to be somewhere around a few dozen terrabytes large by now. It's become really popular because the admins don't have to worry about backing up the data and they still get decent speeds from the fiber cards and things like OCFS on the SAN make setting up Oracle RAC pretty easy.
 
We have 2-3 terrabyte worth of data on the drives.. Our tape library is 17000+ tapes.

We use a modified tape management system that came with our OS.. we have 20 odd tape drives and they are taken care of manually. A few have autoloaders, but there is a guy there 24/7 to handle the tapes. We probably have maybe only 10-20 gigs or so of data that is actually backed up off-site. No point in realy backing up everything.. the majority of it is worthless to us anyways if it's more then three months old.

No veritas or anything like that. It's all heavily customized by the system programmers.

Of course it's one big mainframe rather then a bunch of crappy PCs. 😛
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Absolutely impossible to accomplish this with scripting and some autoloaders. This is what enterprise backup software is for.
Click to expand...

That's what most enterprise software is for, charging you out the ass for simple software that locks you into some vendor and makes an unmanagable situation not seem so bad.
Click to expand...

Geez, such bitterness.

In this particular case the software isn't badly priced at all for what it accomplishes. It doesn't make an unmanagable situation not seem so bad, it makes an impossible situation possible.
 
Geez, such bitterness.
Click to expand...

Yea, commercial vendors really get under my skin now. There are some worthwhile products out there, but too many of them have come in touting their product as the best thing since Win95 when really it's just an ugly shell around some commands or free libraries that they charge 5 digits for. And then you call their support, since that's the main reason managers like to pay for software, and you have a 50/50 chance of getting some guy in a foreign country that you can't understand or some idiot reading from a paper that has no clue how the product actually works.
 
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