Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional Unix backup utilities. stable does what it claims source available well supported good, unique scheduling module networked scales well from a single system to moderatly large installations Also that it uses native utilities for the backup images, so you can do a restore without having to reinstall Amanda first. This one is more important than it might first appear. In ADSM if you lose ADSM's database or it gets corrupted and you can't restore it, you can't restore anything else, even if the tapes your backups are on are perfectly fine. With amanda you can lose everything and still be able to restore from a tape with standard unix tools. Secondly, and I'm no ADSM/TSM expert, but the folks who run it here aren't yet offering OS X backups. I'm not sure if that's because the product doesn't support it yet or because of some other problem. Just this week someone reported here getting amanda to do OS X backups ok. But it should be noted that there are advantages of ADSM/TSM as well. One is that the client can request a backup asyncronously. Handy for e.g. the laptop user who is only connected sporadically. People have hacked up various workarounds for this for amanda, but it doesn't do it out of the box, yet. Another is that ADSM/TSM recognizes a mobile machine whose IP is changing. If you backup a laptop at work, then take it home or wherever and request a fresh backup, it does the right thing. Amanda would require a bit of work to do this. Another is their incrementals forever. I've argued this one both ways, but it can be handy in some situations. ADSM/TSM takes one full dump when the client is first backed up and then does only incrementals from there on. They can do this because they backup files rather than filesystems, and keep track of everything in the previously-mentioned database. The big advantage to this is when you want to put a machine behind a slow, overcommitted, or expensive network link. You could for example do a full dump on-site first, then move the machine to the remote location with the slow link and it will only need to do incremenals from there on. -Mitch
Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
On Monday 13 January 2003 02:36, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: Hai Jon: I haven't compared AMANDA with other backup utilities extensively. The main reason is - People in our university are using ADSM. I have been using AMANDA for sometime on my machine. I need to have a nice reason for my university for switching over to AMANDA. Few nice reasons could be it's a freebie, works well on heterogeneous systems, open source, etc. But I am also looking for advantages of Amanda over ADSM, which is a licensed one. Some reasons technically.. . about why we should prefer Amanda over ADSM or in fact any other utility. There are also other freebies like Amanda too. Amanda is designed for the absolute minimum of operator intervention, with the operators duties relegated to making sure the next tape, or set of tapes if you have a changer robot, are in place for the next scheduled backup session that you tell cron to run at 1am when hopefully everything is quiet. Amanda uses 3 basic variables in it config file to control how amanda runs. These are: dumpcycle=how many days amanda has to do a full on everything runspercycle= how many times it will be run in the above time tapecycle=how many tapes you have in the rotation, working minimum would be at least 2 runspercycle Amanda doesn't *do* a *fixed* backup schedule per sei, but once the run schedule above is specified, and the disklist file filled in with what amanda is to backup, amanda will move the day of the fulls on each individual path around so they will level out the tape useage per run, normally by advancing the full by a day or more till its happy. You might need to help at startup by bringing in about a tapes worth of data per run when getting started, else she might try to do more than a tapes worth on those first runs trying to play catchup. This generally takes about a 'tapecycle' of runs to fully stabilize. What that means for instance is that I have about 35 gigs spread out over 110 gigs worth of drives, with a 'dumpcycle' setting of 5 days. It puts about 3 gigs on each 4gig DDS2 tape after compressing that which will compress. Some directories are quite sparse, and will smunch to less than 10% of the original size. I couldn't put this system on a single magazine of tapes (4) if all fulls were done on the same day, so this is very economical to me. We had a mesage from another user about 2 weeks back who was using it on a 2.2 terrabyte database system, so apparently it scales nicely. I don't believe he said how big his drive (must have been a library) was though. Amanda is also still being actively developed, and some of us on this list (me included) are always running the latest 'snapshot'. Compare that to arkeia, who license to run a tape library will run you about $2.2k and is more of a pretty face than it is usefull, or bru, also expensive but considerably less. All the others that I've looked at are just wannabees, but most of them are also freebies. However, to be fair, this is the first I've heard of ADSM so I cannot pass judgement on it either way. Recovery with an amanda generated tape is a piece of cake once the system has been reinstalled far enough to have a copy of tar (and gzip if the data is compressed) and dd or some workalike utilities available, the rest of the amanda install is optional. I think you can get that on a boot floppy. No magic cookies that label the tape as useable only with the proprietary software that made the tape are used. I've done a full recovery with nothing but tar, gunzip and dd here. You sometimes have to rethink the phsychology(sp) of how to do backups before you can appreciate amanda, but once the concepts are understood, it makes perfect sense. Those that are determined to do a full on friday night, and incrementals the rest of the week are going to find that it can be done, but it tends to reduce amanda's ability to do the job right and wastes tape. Give her a try, and if there are questions, there are people here who are better than I at giving precise answers. [...] -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:36:33AM +0530, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: I am yet to understand the advantages of AMANDA over other backup utilities like ADSM, etc other than AMANDA being a freebie? May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional Unix backup utilities. stable does what it claims source available well supported good, unique scheduling module networked scales well from a single system to moderatly large installations From your yet to understand, I assume you have compared amanda to other traditional unix backup utilities. May we know some of your comparison results? Or the features you find attractive in other traditional unix backup utilities? -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
--On Monday, January 13, 2003 01:56:16 -0500 Jon LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:36:33AM +0530, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: I am yet to understand the advantages of AMANDA over other backup utilities like ADSM, etc other than AMANDA being a freebie? May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional Unix backup utilities. stable does what it claims source available well supported good, unique scheduling module networked scales well from a single system to moderatly large installations Also that it uses native utilities for the backup images, so you can do a restore without having to reinstall Amanda first. Frank From your yet to understand, I assume you have compared amanda to other traditional unix backup utilities. May we know some of your comparison results? Or the features you find attractive in other traditional unix backup utilities? -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax) -- Frank Smith[EMAIL PROTECTED] Systems Administrator Voice: 512-374-4673 Hoover's Online Fax: 512-374-4501
Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
Hai Jon: I haven't compared AMANDA with other backup utilities extensively. The main reason is - People in our university are using ADSM. I have been using AMANDA for sometime on my machine. I need to have a nice reason for my university for switching over to AMANDA. Few nice reasons could be it's a freebie, works well on heterogeneous systems, open source, etc. But I am also looking for advantages of Amanda over ADSM, which is a licensed one. Some reasons technically.. . about why we should prefer Amanda over ADSM or in fact any other utility. There are also other freebies like Amanda too. Regards, Nitesh On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:36:33AM +0530, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: I am yet to understand the advantages of AMANDA over other backup utilities like ADSM, etc other than AMANDA being a freebie? May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional Unix backup utilities. stable does what it claims source available well supported good, unique scheduling module networked scales well from a single system to moderatly large installations From your yet to understand, I assume you have compared amanda to other traditional unix backup utilities. May we know some of your comparison results? Or the features you find attractive in other traditional unix backup utilities? -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
