Re: [PLUG] Backup Software Recommendation?

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

At 2009-03-06 15:43 -0500, Rob Moore <RMoore@afsc.org> wrote:
> Thanks for all the input! I'll buy the book.

I'm coming late to this party, but I back the recommendation to get
W. Curtis Preston's book. He's got some kooky ideas about how to set
up specific commercial products (ie, one policy per client in
NetBackup; I understand why, but even the redesigned scheduler under
6.x bends and breaks under the load with a few thousand clients),
but what's actually in that book is all completely solid. Also, he's
a great guy in person.

You probably want the more recent version ("Backup & Recovery"),
which focuses on open source software, rather than the older version
("Unix Backup & Recovery"), which is broader and covers various
commercial products too (also, a bit dated at this point), and also
rather than the forthcoming version ("Enterprise Backup & Recovery",
tentatively), which will focus on commercial solutions.

It may also be worth looking at the forums and Curtis's blog at his
website, http://www.backupcentral.com/.

I only skimmed your original post, but if you're just doing backups
to tape of one system, you may be fine with Curtis's shell script,
included with the book. If you're backing up other systems across
the network, the most mature open source thing running right now is
Bacula, whose design methodology takes a lot from NetBackup, a bit
from TSM, and a bit from NetWorker... because it was written by
professionals familiar with those products. Maybe it's just because
it's familiar *to me*, but there's something to be said for doing
things the same way the industry has settled on. It may not be the
best, but it's Good Enough.

You're planning to use tape, so you probably don't need something
like Brad Fitzpatrick's brackup (encrypts blocks of data, stores
them with Amazon S3 or similar), but it may merit a glance too.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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