Backup stragety in a network environment, what tools exist?

[John R. Galloway]

One of my current clients has a large network of Suns, diskless and
diskfull 3/50's, 3/60's, 386i's, NFS servers and of couse ND servers.
Their current policy is to shutdown the NFS servers for nightly backup.  I
find this somewhat annoying since then my diskless node is basically (if
not completely when the ND server, which is also an NFS server is down)
useless.  The rational seems to be that if not shutdown the backups are
indeterminate, if you want to restore you can't tell for sure what tape to
uses since a file (particularly one in an ND partition?) might or might
not have been backed up.  It seems like some sort of network
administrative tool is needed here to manage backups.  The situation is
even worse if you include managing the backup of diskFULL workstation in a
uniform way withOUT the need to bother the stations user (i.e. by the MIS
dept.).  What exists along these lines?  How do other large sites handle
these issues?

apple!jrg	John R. Galloway, Jr.       contract programmer, San Jose, Ca

These are my views, NOT Apple's, I am a GUEST here, not an employee!!