backing up commercial apps
Good day guys, What is amanda's approach to backup commercial software like Microsoft Exchange 5.5 mail server? It's because in Exchange, they have this public store and private store files. Commercial backup such as BackupExec can backup/restore each mailboxes via agents. Will there be any future path that Amanda is looking into? Or is Amanda is just really looking into perfecting back up of unix filesystem? I also heard that backing up registry of the Windows Oses is a bit crappy at the moment. Any comments will be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much again. Ronneil
Re: backing up commercial apps
On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 07:44:31AM -0500, Neil wrote: Good day guys, What is amanda's approach to backup commercial software like Microsoft Exchange 5.5 mail server? It's because in Exchange, they have this public store and private store files. Commercial backup such as BackupExec can backup/restore each mailboxes via agents. Will there be any future path that Amanda is looking into? Or is Amanda is just really looking into perfecting back up of unix filesystem? I also heard that backing up registry of the Windows Oses is a bit crappy at the moment. Any comments will be greatly appreciated. First, amanda doesn't backup anything. It manages backups. Using your terminology from above, amanda uses agents to do the actual backing up. The common agents that amanda uses are gnutar and various unix dump-style programs. Amanda was developed on unix, with no intention to deal with non-unix systems. IIRC, the only reason that amanda started doing windows (pun intended) was that the freeware package, samba, included a gnutar-like capability, which could pull files from a windows host to a unix host. As a manager, amanda just schedules and runs these agents. Any capabilities and particularly any deficiencies, are those of the agents. For example, gnutar, backing up unix systems has undesireable affects on file time stamps. Dump-style programs have limitations of only doing incrementals on entire file systems. Samba has limitations of ... You get what you pay for. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: backing up commercial apps
On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Neil wrote: What is amanda's approach to backup commercial software like Microsoft Exchange 5.5 mail server? It's because in Exchange, they have this public Jon's reply is a good description of amanda itself. Haven't checked into it yet but I've heard there's another project at sourceforge that's working on a native windows client for amanda. It may well be better than doing the samba thing. Will there be any future path that Amanda is looking into? Or is Amanda is just really looking into perfecting back up of unix filesystem? I also heard that backing up registry of the Windows Oses is a bit crappy at the moment. Well as Jon pointed out amanda isn't perfecting any filesystem's backup. That's the filesystem maintainer's job. Amanda just wants to make it easier for you to run backups so you can spend more time doing something else. Those of us wanting to backup fs's and db's that amanda doesn't already do are building bridges between amanda's architecture and the backup tools used by the things we want to backup. Registry backup is a challenge for most windows backup schemes. There is a tool somewhere (sorry, don't recall the name) that will snapshot the registry into a quiescent file. If you want to get a good backup of the registry, find this tool and schedule it to run before your backup starts. Then backup the registry dump file. This is pretty much the same scheme used to backup most any database regardless of OS. -Mitch
