re: [OT] Re: xfsdump sample scripts

[Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17@duke.edu>]

On Fri, 17 May 2002 at 12:20pm, Greg Freemyer wrote

> It sounded as if it was targeting a collection of Linux servers being 
> backed up to a single tape drive.

Actually the design is for one or more *nix boxes (and Win boxes via 
samba) backing up to a single tape drive.  Many people do use it for a 
single server, however.

> I'm just backing up one server to local large disk drive.  (This is 
> just what the sample script does as well. :) )

Version 2.4.3 of amanda (currently in beta3) does this by design, using 
files on disk as if they were tapes.  Previous versions could do it by 
just specifying a non-existent device as the tape drive, and letting 
backups stay on the holding disk.

> Does using Amanda in this type of an environment simplify life, or make 
> it worse.

Amanda is *very* nice.  It does almost all the management, so you don't 
have to.  But...

> In particular, I want to come up with a end-user friendly restore mechanism.  

amrecover (the command line file recovery utility) is very friendly.  Tell 
it the date, and it will list the files that existed on that day.  So you 
can even recover multiple versions of the same file, depending upon date.

> My plan is to keep the last 30 days of backups online and I would like 
> to give end-users the ability to restore their own files.  Hopefully via 
> a http interface.

Well, amrecover does want to be run as root.  sudo could take care of 
that, but then you have issues with users having access to the files of 
others.  And I don't know of any http front end, so this may be an issue.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University