Subject: Re: other backup technologies?
To: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
From: Rob Deker <deker@digex.net>
List: current-users
Date: 01/05/1997 15:32:07
On Sun, 5 Jan 1997, Matthew Jacob wrote:

> For those of you who don't know, Legato was a company founded by
> some ex-Sun folks (Jon Kepecs, Bob Lyon, Rusty Sandberg, Joe Moran)
> some years back. They have a rather bulky and large backup product
> called 'NetWorker' which uses a client/server model to do network
> backups. They support 5-6 server platforms (not including OEMs like
> Digital who repackage and rename the product as PolyCenter Backup),
> and about 20-30 clients (including non-unix clients like MacOS,
> Microsoft stuff, and even Banyan ....).
> 
since we are talking about FAST backup solutions here, I feel compelled to
say a few words. We currently use networker for some of our backups at my
office, and we have found it to be anything BUT fast in a lot of cases.
Granted, we are dealing with a much larger volume of data than is being
discussed here (10+ gigs a day), but we are having backups that are
scheduled to be run every 24 hours taking upwards of 30 hours to
complete...

> The product is not cheap, and has, like any hugely overcomplicated
> product, lots of wierdities, but it *does* have something which
> I find useful - an online index. I always find it helpful when I
> accidentally delete things or totally get lost to just retrieve
Beware of these indexes when they grow to a large size though. We had to
nuke ours because it got ove 2gigs...

> last nights' backup copies. I've heard that Amanda does a nice
> job, but I haven't looked at it yet to see where it might be
> better.
> 
AManda does a good job, but lacks one thing that makes networker nice.
Amanda doe not have the ability to put portions of multiple backups on a
tape, so, if you don't fill a tape you just waste space with Amanda.

rob

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