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Re: dump or Legato Networker?



 >Different situations require different methods, but a 
>combination of Amanda, rsync and custom scripts can handle 
>anything. 

I'd agree with this statement, but as your data size reaches several TB 
Amanda+rsync+custom scripts approach may become very complicated. 

Amanda doesn't support multi-tape backup, i.e. it's not able to backup to 
many tapes at the same time, but commercial packages like Legato do. That's 
mean that full backup of several TB will take a long time. 
Amanda doesn't support NDMP, so if you try to backup a lot of data over the 
network you need to use rsync because NFS throughput is not great , but 
rsync will run out of memory if you'll try to sync millions of files. 
Also, if you are using multi-slot/tape backup libraries, then features like 
automatic tape rotation/archiving/deletion may not be available to you 
because unfortunately none of the large backup libraries are officially 
compatible with open source backup software. 
I am sure there is always a workaround for anything, but I think backup is 
the only area where I could not find a comprehensive open-source alternative 
to the commercial packages for the situations where size of archived data 
can reach many terabytes. 

I was always surprised why none of the open source backup packages 
implements NDMP. NDMP support is really a most significant advantage of 
commercial backup software. 

Eugene. 

On Nov 12, 2007 5:45 PM, Dan Ritter <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 03:41:09PM -0500, Scott Ehrlich wrote: 
> > I'm currently using dump for backups and am happy with it.  Haven't 
> tried 
> > to restore yet, but a long-time colleague/admin swears by dump/restore - 
> 
> Danger Will Robinson! Danger! 
> 
> If you haven't tested the restore system, it does not work. 
> 
> And nobody cares about backups, only restores. 
> 
> > and the tools are free, come with linux distros,and have community 
> support. 
> 
> > I am aware that Legato can be used to help integrate with databases, 
> > Exchange, etc with special addons.  But for general filesystem 
> > preservation... dump or Legato.   Let's put money aside for now and just 
> > consider overall integrity of files and filesystems. 
> 
> Amanda can do pretty much everything Legato can do, but you will 
> have to write some scripts yourself. For example, if you want to 
> dump an Oracle database, it is much better to have your DBA tell 
> you the best method for your situation on a per Oracle-version 
> basis -- 8 has better methods than 7, 10 has much better methods 
> than 8... 
> For a MySQL database, use the MySQL tools. Repeat as necessary for 
> Postgres, etc. 
> 
> Legato is good to have on your resume... if you want to work 
> with Legato in the future, that is. 
> 
> Different situations require different methods, but a 
> combination of Amanda, rsync and custom scripts can handle 
> anything. 
> 
> -dsr- 
> 
> -- 
> Every time you give up a right, the terrorists win. 
> Tyranny is something that creeps up on you. 
> 
> http://tao.merseine.nu:81/~dsr/eula.html<http://tao.merseine.nu:81/%7Edsr/eula.html>is hereby incorporated by reference. 
> 
> -- 
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> 
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