Backup Utility for UNIX??

[JoLLyRoGer]

I more or less need the equivilant of Norton Ghost for UNIX (SCO OpenServer 5.0.x Specifically).

Caveats:
-- It must be able to create a backup image to CD with a floppy bootdisk (some of our machines are archaic).
-- It must be able to restore across multiple partitions (such as a "/u" directory).
-- It must restore to hard drives of varying sizes (not all of our machines are an exact replica of each other).

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
JR..

 

[drag]

Well if you are adventerous you can try your hand at your own scripts using utilities such as tar and dd.

Tar combined with gunzip can create archives that are created (tar is Tape Archive Utility).

dd is a tool to deal with files on a low-level. You can make ISO images using it, you can make drive/partition images, and backup your MBR with it.

there are comprehensive free tools like amanda

Most admins, if they have control over the machines they are setting up often use combinations of basic command line tools and bash/perl scripts to do their backups. People are very successfull with those and often are very effective because of the high amount of customization.

But it sounds like you want something very ready made. Well there are a veriaty of commercial tools called "Supertars" that are very high quality, reliable, and not to bad. Some are around 300 dollars or so.

this guy has some good docs about backups..

Especially if your using SCO. He has been a consultant and Unix expert for many years and has worked with the various SCO Unix OSes quite a bit and is very knowledgable about it. Very insightfull stuff, as far as I can tell.

Of course this is comming from, me, a hopeless Linux geek. Never touched a SCO box in my life. But his docs are applicable to all Unix OSes to one degree or another.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

Thank you for those linkes. Both look as though they may be helpful (especially the Amanda one). I've bookmarked them and I'll have to scour them when I get a free minuite.

In layman's terms, the problem I'm trying to work out is this:

I work in a test lab where we are constantly rebuilding machines with SCO and other proprietary appications. We run various test scenarios against the machines in order to debug our own software. Before each new test, the machines get rebuilt (a 4-8 hour process depending on the speed of the machine).

To a certain extent, they all have the same configuration so I'm looking for a way to streamline our build time in the same mannor one would use Norton Ghost on Windows boxes when required to build several machines the same way with the same applications loaded.

We have Lone-Tar on hand which works well for backing up just SCO, but doesn't incorporate all of the functionality I'm looking for.

I want to be able to build a selected machine once, image it onto one or more discs and take that image straight down the line just like chopping lumber.

I suppose I could try some shell scripting, however I'm not entirely sure how to handle the partition issues (part of the image process would include a complete Oracle DB residing on it's own directory homed off a seperate partition amongst other things.).

I'm a little rusty on my perl, but I suppose that is another avenue to explore.
Thanks again.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

mondo?

 

[Panther505]

GFU == ghost for unix?

Need floppy or cd ... and an FTP server...

will do partitions or drives

Panther



Ghost for Unix

 

[drag]

You could do something crazy with netcat and dd.

here is howto use netcat and dd to image across networks

Like if the harddrives your dealing with are like 15gigs, 20gigs and 30gigs. You create a 15gig, 20gig, and a 30gig image, stick them in a cheapo PC with a couple fast harddrives. Then just choose which image you want to use.

Then you take something like tomsrtbt floppy disk. Mount the floppy image on a loopback and use bash to script a simple menu. As long as your dealing with just standard type hardware toms disk should be able to handle the drivers. Otherwise there are lots of Linux based bootable cdroms you can use.

If you have a whole bunch of machines to do, maybe broadcast the image over the whole network maybe? I don't know how well that would work with flow control and stuff. Maybe you can do a bunch of network transfers them at the same time or at least close to each and the harddrive buffer would be able to keep performance up.

It would take some playing around with stuff to get it working...

 

[Agamar]

Yeah, I like MONDO. I have used it to restore an entire Qmail server for a university...in less then 2 hours.