Advice needed for backups

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

>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??)
>  
>

I use it to backup to HDD. In my configuration , it emulates a set of 
300MB tapes that you can burn to disk (the tapes are only a tar.gz file 
with a text preamble. This preamble even has instructions on how to use 
dd and tar to recover anything directly from the file , or you can use 
the amrecover tool to automatically recover what you need.
As for DVD, I dont know if amanda supports it. But then , you can always 
make a backup to disk using fake 4GB tapes and then after the backup is 
done , you simply copy it to DVD.

As for it being a standard.. It is an excelent tool . I've worked with 
it on my last job as sysadmin and it helps a lot. No need to have tape 
drives and manually searching for a file on all tapes.. Just remmember 
to backup you tape index files.. Without them , all you can do is 
manually recover from the tapes, without the help from amrecover.

--
Pedro Macedo