[BBLISA] dump or Legato Networker?

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, 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 - and the 
> tools are free, come with linux distros,and have community support.
>
> Legato Networker costs a lot, and is commercial.
>
> What arguement(s) can be made of/for Legato vs dump?

Commercial backup solutions offer "enterprise" support, but rarely say 
what that means, beyond "high cost". As far as I can tell, the fundamental 
things they do that dump or rsync won't do are:

   1) Backup a live Oracle database without screwing up.
   2) Backup a live filesystem without missing files.
   3) Send multiple backup sets to the same tape drive simultaneously so
      streaming drives don't shoe-shine
   4) Control tape robots (but mtx can do that now).
   5) GUI interface (but lots of FOSS can do that now).

The basic downside (apart from expense) is that you will need proprietary 
software to do a restore. I may be missing something - we never bought a 
proprietary backup because we didn't need any of the above. But we may be
missing something valuable - I don't know.

If you are interested in backup the Oreilly volume by Curtis Preston is 
very worthwhile. He describes in detail the very unusual circumstances in 
which dump might miss a file from a mounted volume.

Daniel Feenberg

>
> 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.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Scott
>
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