Howdy. Someone forwarded to me a recent article about automated
network backup software and i was glad (being the author) to see
8mmbackup mentioned as one of the two free software packages. I
wanted to clarify a potentially gray issue in the note about
8mmbackup. It said:
> This script does not explicitly deal with backing up machines over a
> network.
In case anyone's unclear, in my division we use 8mmbackup on 6 hosts
to backup up around 8-9 GB of disk storage scattered across 15
servers. (1.3 to 1.5 GB per backup host is a good amount that allows
for a full and at least about two weeks of contiguous incrementals on
a tape.) In fact, it so happens that in almost every case the backup
host is a diskless machine that happens to be conveniently located
(and have a builtin SCSI port) for changing tapes and so forth.
We depend on NFS as our "network transport", as it's dependable and
quite suitable for this purpose. (It didn't seem to me like anything
more was necessary, given that the backups proceed unattended and are
generally quite unobtrusive.)
Anyway, in case there's any doubt, 8mmbackup was intended specifically
to capitalize on the benefits of a high capacity archival medium in a
contemporary Unix network computing context - read: "Exabyte 8mm tape
drives on Unix NFS-coupled machines".
8mmbackup works nicely for us, and i hope it's helpful for others.
Yay.
Ken Manheimer Nat'l Inst of Standards and Technology
klm@cme.nist.gov (301)975-3539 (Formerly Nat'l Bureau of Standards)
Factory Automation Systems Division Unix Systems Support Manager
I like time. It's one of my favorites.
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