[linux-lvm] Backup costs (was: LVM reimplementationre)

[Jesus Manuel NAVARRO LOPEZ]

Hi, Petro:

Petro wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 10:03:12AM +0100, Jesus Manuel NAVARRO LOPEZ wrote:
> 
>>That's plainly untrue: AMANDA for one is free and very good for small 
>>systems.
>>
> 
>     Define "small". 

I'm succesfully using it for 4 servers with two DDS drivers, and I would say it could be easy expandible to the numbers of tens.

It have some "caveats" anyway.  Rigth now it can't manage multivolume 
quite efficiently (a single dump must go to single storage device, for 
instance, and the multichanger specifications is a bit... "raw". 
Management for automatic tape cabinets is out of the system too.  It 
uses an rsh-like client/server protocol to remote access systems so it's 
not soo secure -while it can be ssh-tunneled -not out-of-the-box.  It 
doesn't support multiserial backups on a single config -but you can have 
multiple definitions so off-site monthly backups don't interfere with 
your monday-to-friday daily series, for instance).  What it does pretty 
well is automatically balance the backup levels for all your partitions 
to optimize tape space and indexing your tapes (both semi-automatically 
indexing tapes and maintain the index about what was where... it can 
even help you the physical tape-labels, so you just print what amanda 
tells you to, and have some -primitive, ability to create graphic logs 
to help you planning capacity in advance).  It will e-mail you too if 
you forget to put the tape in the drive too.
Appart from this, it uses underlying backup tools (dump by default, tar 
or smbtar if you choose it) so you can restore even without amanda 
software present (while it's more difficult: you just don't have a tape 
labelled like "first-monday-of-the-month-so-level0-backups-here", but 
only something like "Comm-dpt-tape-no12": if you loose your indexes you 
will have to look at the labels for the dumps to guess what's in-there. 
  Anyway, those indexes are simple text files so they're easy to copy to 
another box in advance, and they're sent day-to-day by e-mail to the 
backup operator, so you do have options to avoid that situation).
-- 
SALUD,
Jesús
***
jesus_navarro at promofinarsa.es
***