Advice needed for backups

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 15:54 -0700, Ian McKinnon wrote:
> Hi all,
> This may be a little off topic (not directly related to FC) but I do need a
> little advice for my FC server.
> 
> I have been searching for a backup method for my personal server (files,
> mysql).  As I am currently a student, and cannot afford a tape backup system
> I would like to backup to the DVD-R / RW drive I have in my server.
> 
> Is this a feasible idea?  I have seen that there is at least one commercial
> product that will backup to optical media, but unfortunately I have to slosh
> through multiple pages of people wanting to copy DVDs (for archival purposes
> of course) on their Linux systems just to find a nibble or two.  Is there
> anything available through yum or apt already for FC?

Not that I am aware of, though there might be something in Dag and
friends.
This is something I started thinking about just the other day as well -
my current backup scheme is all manual, and could be better. There are a
couple different project I have started to look at, though I've tested
none.

I hope to find a Free OSS solution that works either standalone (server
and client on same host) or network (server and and several clients)
that could be packaged for Extras. I want one that does tape but can
also do backup to DVD-R, and preferable one that that also has clients
for Windows/OS X (though that's not *quite* as important to me)

I've tested none so I can't recommend one, but I definitely want to
watch this thread.
Amanda seems to be the standard for a long time now, but I believe it
only works with tape drives (is it possible to use a loopback device as
tape drive and then burn the image??)

Anyway - I think this is something of interest not only to Fedora, but
to RHEL as well - if there is a good Free OSS server/client pair.