[BBLISA] dump or Legato Networker?

[Steven M Jones]

No wonder my two responses never showed up -- "reply" sent them to the
OP and not the list...

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.
>   

As others have said: Test what you _think_ you've backed up. You don't
want to have to explain that you never verified your backups when your
users' data is gone.

I don't trust the Linux versions of dump/restore, but this dates back
to when ext2 was king. It simply was not reliable in terms of getting
back what you put into it, and everybody "out there" seemed to rely on
tar and just lived with it. But perhaps that's changed, certainly
enough years have passed that it should have.

On BSDish systems, dump+restore is the standard for integrity and it
gets things like device specials, sockets, and other interesting files
right. FreeBSD gives you filesystem snapshots, which you can then use
to get a consistent dump image. This doesn't eliminate open file
issues, but it tightens the window up a whole lot.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/snapshots.html

Systems like Amanda, Bacula and Networker will give you tape management,
scheduling, and other goodies that you probably really want, especially
if you have a multi-tape device like a robot or carousel. Amanda (at
least) will let you specify what underlying archiver you want to use for
each volume, e.g. tar on Linux, dump on BSD, ufsdump on Solaris, etc.

Legato probably has better support for larger tape libraries, and more
sophisticated ways to manage mutliple backup streams over a given set of
pipes or SAN fabrics.

Keep in mind that with Amanda I can read the archived files from tape on
any compatible system, since it uses native tools that I specify. On the
other hand Networker is probably using it's own proprietary format, and
you'll need a licensed, compatible version to restore anything. Might
not be a concern, then again it might...

The larger your installation, the less of a concern this sort of thing
would be. If I had a lot of servers and a lot of tape devices, I would
give Networker a very serious look. When I worked with it many years ago
it was a nice product and well-suited to such scenarios.

--Steve.

Steve Jones
(once a sysadmin, now just another PHB...)