Backup Solutions

[Mike Hogsett]

> I am curious as to what people using FreeBSD use for a Backup Solution.  Are 
> there any Comercial software available for Tape Backup Solutions that run wel
> l on FreeBSD?
> 
> I'm looking at using a Dell PowerVault 110T LTO tape drive and was looking fo
> r software to utilize to backup the 10 servers and growing in my server farm.


I use amanda (/usr/ports/misc/amanda-*) on a Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz machine w/
2Gbytes of RAM running FreeBSD 4.8.  The machine contains a 3ware ATA RAID
card with 6 120Gbyte disks attached and concatinated into a single volume
and is used for temporary holding space for the dump files.  The tape and
tape changer device is a Dell PowerEdge 122T with an LTO tape drive
connected via an Adaptec SCSI controller.  I use `mtx'
(/usr/ports/misc/mtx) to control the tape changer.  To top it off the
machine interfaces to the network using an Intel 1000baseSX ethernet over
fiber network card which is sub-interfaced using VLANs onto all of the
subnets in our switch infrastructure (this means backup traffic doesn't
hit the router).

This machine backs up approximately 200Gbytes per night.  This consists of
157 partitions accross 64 hosts.  The hosts are a combination of Solaris,
Linux, FreeBSD, DEC (OFS/1), and AIX machines.  I get level zero dumps of
each partition every 4 days and sometimes more frequently.

Backups start at 7PM and typically run for about 6 to 8 hours.

Hope that helps.

 - Michael Hogsett