Has anyone tried using Amanda w/ Oracle? How about Oracle RAC on top of ASM? We'd like to move away from Veritas NetBackup for various reasons, not the least of which is cost, but backing up Oracle tends to be tricky and I want to make sure we don't get burned.
General preferences from people on open source/ semi-open source (like Zmanda) backups? Nicholas On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Jack Coats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <soapbox> > I don't know your particular case, but please consider the 'life cycle > cost' of backups. > After being on both sides of this kind of cost cutting scenario, it will > be hard to beat the > service per $ expended after you fully burden what it really costs to do > and maintain backups. > Doing the backup is only the start. > > Full disclosure: I spent about 20 years doing backups and > disaster/recovery planning, testing, > and having to recover from disasters. I am not employed doing that now > but have in the past. > </soapbox> > > The big kids on the block use Legato or NetBackup or Tivoli Storage > Manager. That is about > 80+% of the 'major systems backup' market. BackupExec is NetBackups > little brother. > > They all work. They all take way more time in care and feeding than (I) > ever expected to have to spend. > Amanda, Backula, BackupPC, Dirvish are all open source products worth > looking into. > > Do not allow multiple backup processes to run overlapping. It sometimes > generates file lock conditions > even when they say they don't or 'shouldn't'. Even if the various > 'dumpdates' or fingerprinting methods > 'shouldn't' interfere, they invariably do. I have had to cancel backups > way to often due to that. > > Even straight 'dump' or 'tar' to tape backup servers interfere with the > rsync type backups. I fought that > battle to much too. > > If you have the space, you might run 'disk snapshots' and backup the > snapshot. This is especially good if > backing up databases (Postgres, MySQL, M$SQL, Oracle, M$Exchange, etc) > and keeps the database > downtime to a minimum (seconds or minutes, versus hours). And doing the > shutdown rather than quiesce > or using an agent allows for a better, and more easily restored, backup. > > Also, if you are taking on the backup tasks, you NEED to take on the > task of testing your backups regularly. > I have found lots of folks (red faced, me too on occasion) that had lots > of backups, but nothing could be > restored from those backups. > > Doing backups is not 'cheap or easy', but it is still less expensive > than the expenses the data loss would generate. > > One time, my bosses didn't want to put another $100K into their backup > system I was managing. I told them it > is OK. But I was wanting them to find out what the insurance policy > premium would be to cover us all if the backups > did not work so the stock holders could get their value out of the > company when it went bankrupt due to lost data > if the data had to be restored. I got the upgrade. (This was a small > regional bank, I was the only backup person, > we backed up about 80 windows and AIX machines using IBM's Tivoli > Storage Manager and BackupEXEC. > We had about 800 LTO tapes under management with one small tape > library. About half the machines were local > and half attached over T1 links that we could not saturate for backup > purposes.) > > I don't mean to scare anyone about backups, but backups are like > insurance. And the premiums are never fun to pay. > > ... Take care, ... Jack > > Elizabeth Schwartz wrote: >> This is a somewhat loose question but we're still in the brainstorming >> stage.... >> >> We're currently outsourcing all our backups to central IT, who uses >> Legato. This is expensive. We'd like to cut our backup costs while >> continuing to take advantage of the Legato team's infrastructure for >> full/archival/DR backups. >> >> Seems like the currently popular open source backup options are Amanda >> and Bacula. Rsync also becomes a contender if we're doing >> disk-to-disk. >> >> Am I correct in thinking that amanda uses /etc/amandates, bacula uses >> /etc/dumpdates, Legato uses its own database, and rsync checks the >> files on disk against the existing archive, so none of these systems >> would run interference with each other? >> Am I missing any obvious good choices? >> >> Anyone here doing mixed method backups? The wildcard is that I don't >> control the Legato server and need to choose from a set of fixed >> schedule choices, none of which are really working for us. I may want >> to go fight for a customized schedule but I'll want to be dang sure >> it's going to meet our needs. (and there's a whole nother layer of fu >> around Legato not understanding native ZFS and needing every single >> ZFS volume to be legacy mounted, but that's another post) >> >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
