"Dr. David Kirkby" wrote: > > Can anyone tell me if they use amanda and are a large commercial company > (> 250 employees), a hospital or a university and if so how much it's > used (whole institution, small department, single server etc). How many > Gb do you back up (don't answer that if you feel its confidential, or > you don't know).
Thank you to everyone who sent information about their large backups using amanda. Some of the backups are well in excess of what is expected here (~200-400 Gb) and the fact they are large institutions gives me a good case to suggest that we take this route too. Clearly suggesting package X developed by Mr. Y who has a few home users using it, would not be a good case to implement it for backups. But this is clearly not the case with amanda - there are plenty of big institutions using the package for large backups. We don't have any database to back up and we don't (as far as I know) back up a file system greater than the size of the tape drive. I know one of the support people suggested to me for my home system that I did not let file systems span tapes, so I doubt they will do so here. However, as I said, I am not in the computer support group and have no control over how backups are performed. I looked on the Sun web site and see that transferring a licence of Veritas might not be free either, depending on the hardware the machine is moved too. That too is a convincing argument to stick with a free package. I might look at amanda for my home machine, although I'm tempted to leave well along with my odd unix scripts run from cron. I've never had a major catastropy (disk failure, # rm -rf / or similar) but whenever I have needed to get back information, it has never presented me the slightest problem. I occsionally boot from CD and back up the root file system on the machine with clearly no open files at all. I print my own labels in a way that suits me, move some tapes off-site etc. I will however look at the documentation, but are tending to think "Don't fix what is not broke". However, I have a few other machines on my network now, so perhaps its the time to sort out something better. I don't tend to back them up at all, since the data on them is of no use to me - I only use them to check software compiles on different hardware and operating systems. Sorry I have not replied to anyone who sent me individual emails, but the response as been huge, so I would spend all day replying to each e-mail. I want to get some work done! Dr. David Kirkby PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Medical Physics, University College London, 11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA. Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269 Internal telephone: ext 46408 e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web page: http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek
