>Has anyone used Amanda on OS X release? ...
I just spent some time with my local Mac wizard and he says getting
Amanda working is probably not too hard (he gave me an account on his
machine, but I haven't decide whether to thank or curse him for that :-).
Getting a backup program that Amanda can use will be the trick.
Apparently there isn't a system dump yet for HFS, and GNU tar will only
do the data, not the resource fork or Finder info.
However, we played a bit with this and with some changes to GNU tar,
it could be made to work.
It turns out that if you have a file named XXX, you can refer to XXX/rsrc
and XXX/info (and other things) to get to the other information. So if we
change GNU tar to know about this and after it processes the data fork,
try to also do each of the information types, it will end up with a tar
image like this:
other-stuff
.../XXX
.../XXX/info
.../XXX/rsrc
When you try to read this on a non-Mac system, it will load the data
portion and then whine about what looks like an attempt to create a
directory structure under a file. However, on a Mac system it does
exactly the right thing.
There has been discussion for quite a while about how to handle ACL's
with tar, in particular with Samba for doing NT backups. The idea was to
write the file twice into the image. The first time would be attributes
(such as ACL's, but could also include the resource fork, etc), and
the second would be the "real" data. Some flag would also have to go
into the tar header to distinguish the two. There would also have to
be decisions about what the data looked like.
During reload on a uninformed system, the attribute information would come
back first then the real file would follow and overwrite it, leaving you
with the "data fork" and no other information, but it would not whine.
Of course, on an updated system, it would save the attributes someplace,
reload the file, then apply the them.
I think Windows has other file attribute information besides ACL's
that may also have to be dealt with for a full featured backup program,
but don't know much more about it.
So, there needs to be a major argument :-) among the GNU tar developers,
the Samba folks and maybe the Amanda folks on the sideline about how to do
this (which of the above, if either, or something else). That shouldn't
take more than a decade or two to come to a consensus :-).
>Is Amanda on OS X a sufficient backup scheme for user data that
>consists of mostly Word/Excel/etc. (i.e using OS X as a better Mac,
>not as a better Unix)?
It will take some work. As I said, I now have an OS X account and can
maybe get the basics going (although I think I remember someone else
was working on this).
Any further discussion of this should probably go on in amanda-hackers.
> Greg Troxel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
