[BBLISA] dump or Legato Networker?

[John Stoffel]

Scott> I'm currently using dump for backups and am happy with it.
Scott> Haven't tried to restore yet, but a long-time colleague/admin
Scott> swears by dump/restore - and the tools are free, come with
Scott> linux distros,and have community support.

Remember, no one cares about backups, ever.  They only care about
restores.  So do yourself a favor and do a retore to make sure you're
actually writing data to the tapes properly.  

Tales about of people who wrote multiple backups to a single tape, not
realizing for months that they had opened the wrong device, which
caused the tape to rewind to the beginning after each session was
done.  

Time comes to do a retore, and the only data is from the last
session.  Ooops!

Scott> Legato Networker costs a lot, and is commercial.

I'd point you to Amanda and Bacula as free alternatives which do a
decent job.  Networker, which I've used for years, has some really
nice CLI commands which give you alot of power over your backups
without having to use a GUI.  And they're well documented.

Bacula is also well documented, but it's command line tools suck in
comparision to Legato's.  Can't remember much about Amanda's tools,
it's been years since I last used it.  

Scott> What arguement(s) can be made of/for Legato vs dump?

Legato allows you to browse your backups and select only the file(s)
you want to restore, and will do so efficiently, without having to
scan the entire tape from end to end to do said restore.

This goes back to my point above, users only care about restores, not
about backups. 

Scott> I am aware that Legato can be used to help integrate with databases, 
Scott> Exchange, etc with special addons.  But for general filesystem 
Scott> preservation... dump or Legato.   Let's put money aside for now and just 
Scott> consider overall integrity of files and filesystems.

Scott> Thanks.

Scott> Scott

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