Backup stragety in a network environment, what tools exist?

[David Kuder]

In article <28358 at apple.Apple.COM> jrg at apple.com (John R. Galloway) writes:
	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.  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.

There is a long running discussion about wether "dump(8)" can be run on
active disks reliably.  At the USENIX Large Systems Administration
conference large amounts of anecdotic evidence that running dump against
lightly used disks was fine.  The concensus was also that you pay your
money and take your chances.  The general compromise was to run daily
incremental dumps at times when little activity was expected and full
dumps against shutdown disks.

In article <28358 at apple.Apple.COM> jrg at apple.com (John R. Galloway) continues:
	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?

The Large Systems Admin. conference had several papers describing
different schemes.  The most common was to do disk to disk backups from
the workstations to the server and then do backups from there to removable
media (tapes or disk packs).  One site used a "networked tape ape" who ran
around from WS to WS sliding in cartridge tapes for the nightly cron dump.

____*_  David A. Kuder              {sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david
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