For your home machine, amanda still makes sense. It can schedule full dumps of partitions over multiple nights, etc. and do the bookkeeping of what is on what tape. I know several people that run amanda at home.
My department has ~30 employees. We run 2 amanda setups onto DDS3 and 1 onto DDS2, and back up around 130 GB total (one has 93 GB of that). They are not separate because one couldn't handle it, but for administrative reasons I don't want to go into. Absent the administrative reasons, we'd probably have everything on one setup and I'm confident it would work fine. The servers are desktop PCs running NetBSD with SCSI cards and DDS3 tape drives. A no longer loved sparc 20 with NetBSD is a decent choice for smaller setups; there is one such setup at MIT backing up about 6 machines. For 100 people you probably want DLT, and maybe a changer. (Assume 400 GB, divide by perhaps 10 for a tape cycle with 30 tapes and full dumps every 10 runs, and an 80 GB native tape should be fine for a while. Remember that you need to buy 2 to have a backup...) I've seen what commercial backup support is like, and the free support or some sysadmin time in your organization is probably as good a bet. My experience is that support people learn amanda faster than commercial backups, and between self help and mailinglist both have fewer problems and solve them faster than commercial backup software. Many others on the list run bigger setups, including with tape changers. Your size of 100 users is not 'large' in terms of existing amanda practice. Points to consider when choosing a backup system: Amanda puts backups on tape in a way that can be read with standard tools (dd, gunzip, restore, tar) by anybody with basic sysadmin clue. You do not need amanda or proprietary tools. Ask how bits can be gotten back with any prospective system. Ask if there is license managment software that must work to get bits back. Amanda self-schedules full dumps to fit. The administrative burden is _very_ low. I am a researcher not a sysadmin, and run a 36 GB total setup. Most days I spend 1 minute glancing at the report, typing 'mt offline' and putting in the next tape. Even with this, I am confident that all the bits are on tape if the report has no exception items. I have seen a commercial system for MS Windows completely fail to achieve its mission when indices were only on RAID sets and not on tape (multiple disk failures occurred). Amanda puts the bits on tape, and you can read them back with any other computer and a tape drive, even if you don't have the indices. You may have to scan 20 tapes, but that's a good situation to be in after a catastrophic failure, really. The importance of backups should lead to a regular program of randomly selected test restores to do QA. We have had a 100% success rate for getting bits back when we needed them (several times since 1995 or so, both disk failure and mistaken rm). Our real only issue was a tape drive that wrote bits wrong, and we read the entire tape back once a week with amverify to ensure that the tape drive works. I consider amanda as reliable as anything commercial, and really even more so. to be fair: Amanda's big weakness is in making multiple tapes for offsite storage. This can be done by various ways discussed on the list, none of which are particularly pretty. One is just to do a tape-tape copy after the dump, and ship one of them offsite. I gather than some commercial programs have explicit support for this. The other downside is that amanda doesn't have integrated Oracle support, etc. If you have postgres and do pg_dump to a file, that seems to work fine. Amanda security is a bit weak. Kerberos is not really supported, even though the code is sort of there. The 'bsd style' authentication is bogus (IP address check). But although I say this, every commercial package I've examined in detail has been worse. Good questions to ask are whether there is strong authentication and confidentiality of the data stream, both authenticating the server to the client to authorize the request to send the bits (most important), and the client to the server to ensure that the right bits are on tape. And, the bits should be encrypted in transit. Amanda/kerberos can do this, and I'm running it, but it's not trivial. One could use IPsec, too, although that may require minor wizardry. Greg Troxel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>