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Open-Source Backups Using Amanda

Aug 19, 2004  By Phil Moses
 in
This well tested network backup tool depends on standard tools such as dump, cron and GNU tar. Find out how to set up regular backups for your whole network.
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New documentation

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 02/28/2006 - 02:12.

Amanda project has seen lots of new developments lately. It also has a cool new wiki with great documentation:

Amanda Wiki

fsbackup

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 08/21/2004 - 02:00.

Other very flexible backup tool:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/fsbackup_project/

Re: Open-Source Backups Using Amanda

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 02:00.

Another backup tool to consider:
http://flexbackup.sourceforge.net/

up and running in less then 10 minutes
Supprots incremental and differential backups,
a lot of backup methods: tar/star afio cpio ...
so you don't restricted to something specific

On the fly cdrw?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 08/19/2004 - 02:00.

Although I prefer the command line for burning iso images, when it comes to making data backups, I have an easier time with k3b. I recently tried backing up my mail directory, but I have so many emails (maildir, heavy mailing lists), that the k3b app locked up, and I wasn't able to use it. It's probably about 5 GB in size, including sub-directories. I was attempting to span the mail directory across multiple cdrws for backup, but since it crashed...
Also, from what I understand, since it is about 5 GB, I'm assuming I have to make a 5 GB size iso image, split to fit on the 700 MB disks. Can this be done on-the-fly?

In other words, is there a way to backup a directory, say 5 GB in size, so that the directory is compressed to (example, approximate) about 2 GB using tar or other compression utility, then break that 2 GB tarred file into 3 files, 700 MB, 700 MB, 600 MB, and burn those files to 3 CDs, without needing 2 GB hard disk space to temporarily store the files?

2 GB may not sound like much with today's hard drive sizes, but if the above is possible, I'm also planning on backing up entire partitions, using multiple CD disks (I'm sticking with CDR/RW until the larger DVD drives, 50+GB, come out).

Manually creating tar files, then breaking them up to 700 MB each, then organizing the disks, and making sure there is enough room on partitions for all the data, starts turning into such a logistical hassle that it never gets done. I just want to type out a command, write the label for the cd, stick the cd in the drive, hit enter, have the cd eject, put the next cd in, hit enter again, and continue the process until done.

Is this a possibility? Anyone care to share commands used to tar and burn in the same command using pipes? Or should the commands be separated because of the risk of making coasters?

tia.

Re: On the fly cdrw?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 02:00.

Mondo Rescue + Mindi - http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/ will compress the source(s) and create and burn multiple iso's for CDs spanning the source. Besides the link to Hugo's (the author) site, see "Bootable Restoration CDs with Mondo", Linux Journal, October 2003. Though, it is meant as a bare metal recovery tool.

mondoarchive for Enterprise Linux... Is there such a thing.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/15/2006 - 17:40.

I've used mondoarchive for other distributions, RH7.3, Rh8.0, RH9.0, but I haven't been able to make it work with enterprise es. I've looked all over the net, but I cannot seem to find information about this, binaries, howto...nothing. Almost, like they were swallowed by the earth.

Thanks.

Re: On the fly cdrw?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 02:00.

cdbkup is an excellent tool for this. It will, on the fly, tar the data and split the tar files up onto individual CD's. It has similar tools to concatenate the files back together and untar them to restore. It only needs 650MB of space in /tmp during the backup procedure (as it works with 1 iso at a time)

Re: On the fly cdrw?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 02:00.

I too have the need to backup up a few gigs of data to CDRW.

I use Mondo Rescue, as you can set it to backup direct to the CDRW (it'll prompt you to change CDs) or if like me you want it done overnight, you can tell it to backup to ISO images of the size you specify, then burn the ISOs manually.

Re: Open-Source Backups Using Amanda

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 02/04/2005 - 15:23.

Another backup tool to consider:
http://flexbackup.sourceforge.net/

up and running in less then 10 minutes
Supprots incremental and differential backups,
a lot of backup methods: tar/star afio cpio ...
springbreak so you don't restricted to something specific

On the fly DVD should be possible

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 02:00.

In other words, is there a way to backup a directory, say 5 GB in size, so that the directory is compressed to (example, approximate) about 2 GB using tar or other compression utility, then break that 2 GB tarred file into 3 files, 700 MB, 700 MB, 600 MB, and burn those files to 3 CDs, without needing 2 GB hard disk space to temporarily store the files?

2 GB may not sound like much with today's hard drive sizes, but if the above is possible, I'm also planning on backing up entire partitions, using multiple CD disks (I'm sticking with CDR/RW until the larger DVD drives, 50+GB, come out).

I have been wondering about a similar situation, and
am beginning to lean towards a DVD solution. The reason is
that some DVD formats (DVD+RW and DVD-RAM) can be made
to act almost like a hard disk. If this works as advertised,
writing a compresed 4G archive without intermediate ISO images is
easy.

This inspired by the writeup at

http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

However, not yet tried this in practice. Should get and installl a DVD drive first (but now DVD writers, even multi-standard ones, are finally begining to be reasonably priced).

But has anyone yet tries this strategy?

I Use Amanda - but am going to move to something else

langles's picture
Submitted by langles (not verified) on Thu, 08/19/2004 - 02:00.

While the only backup tool I've used to date is Amanda, I'm prepared to abandon it for another tool with features more to my liking - still open-source, of course. Others must have felt the same way, given the number of different backup programs out there. In my search, I've come across these tools with no special support for backups across a network:

afio - http://freshmeat.net/projects/afio/
Mondo Rescue + Mindi - http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/
storebackup - http://sourceforge.net/projects/storebackup/
Taper - http://taper.sourceforge.net

and these tools that do offer some support for backups across a network:

afbackup - http://sourceforge.net/projects/afbackup/
Amanda CD-RW Taper - http://www.tivano.de/software/amanda/
bacula - http://www.bacula.org
BackupPC - http://backuppc.sourceforge.net
Box Backup - http://www.fluffy.co.uk/boxbackup/
DAR - http://dar.linux.free.fr
Drakbackup - http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~sbenedict/
duplicty - http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/
FauBackup - http://faubackup.sourceforge.net
Hdup - http://miek.nl/projects/hdup16/hdup16.html
rdiff-backup - http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/

There's even a few more tools listed at these two pages:

http://www.backupcentral.com/free-backup-software2.html
http://directory.fsf.org/sysadmin/Backup/

This long introduction leads me to the one page I've found so far comparing various open-source backup tools:

http://www.fluffy.co.uk/boxbackup/comparison.html

By the author of Box Backup - which I'm sure reflects his biases.

It would be nice to see more such comparisons as well as hear peoples' experiences with these various tools.

Backup utilities - open source

turtlewax's picture
Submitted by turtlewax (not verified) on Fri, 06/01/2007 - 07:09.

I have used cobian backup for some time on the windows OS with great success. Supports compressed backups, FTP, network, encrypted and password locked archives, full/incremental/scheduled backups, more.
It has been freeware for a long time and now it is open source too.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobianbackup

In response to the above, the

Mark Ferrel's picture
Submitted by Mark Ferrel (not verified) on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 02:44.

In response to the above, the closest free/open-source alternative to Amanda that I've found until now is Bacula. While most of the other systems mostly seem to focus on small backups to harddrive or CD/DVD, Bacula is a real client/server backup system (like Amanda) that caters for users who backup a network of multiple clients/servers to tape (ie it has built-in tape/volume handling, scheduling, ...) or other storage systems. Given the problems Amanda had with backing up Win32 machines (when the Samba team changed a single line of output, my whole backup system fell apart) and handling the spanning of backups to multiple tapes, I've migrated to Bacula (that has 'native' backup agents for Win32 and supports tape spanning like everybody else) and never looked back again.

Re: I Use Amanda - but am going to move to something else

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 08/19/2004 - 02:00.

I came across this,

http://www.tpci.com/linux_backup_software.htm

it may interest you.

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