Though I'm not the original poster I'm really interested in this.  I
would love to be able to backup everyone's machine - MacOS, WinCrap,
Linux - from a linux server.

Tom Hudak wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 11:35:44AM -0500, Michael Fraase wrote:
> >Just about the only thing that's keeping us from migrating our servers
> >to some variant of Linux is cross-platform backup software.
> How cross platform. Get a linux box setup, dump that "commercial" crap backup
> software being used and go with amanda. If you have mac's, have the mac users
> put stuff on an appleshare on a *nix server and backup that servers disk at
> night.

That's not really the kind of background the retrospect client offers. 
Scheduled unattended backups of client machines.  Not just the server.
Applescript also offers some very nice automation if you want to spend
the time.

> >Is there software for Linux that will allow me to do the same. I want it
> >transparent, reliable, and in the background.
> Amanda! www.amanda.org. It's never let me down. It's fully automated, and if
> you have a changer, you'll never have to even look at it to backup/restore
> ever again. Not only that, it automagically compares modification dates and
> schedules different levels of incrementals and full backups over your tape
> schedule so you aren't filling up every tape with full-dumps of data that's
> already backed up.

Retrospect does this...
Also allows keyword matching etc.

> It's also well documented and mailing lists are very informative. You got a
> question, post it, and you'll have a *plethora* (yeah yeah) of answers within
> a day. Go get that from the engineers of BRU or Dantz or whoever else makes
> crappy commercial backup software.

I've been very impressed w/ Dantz's support.  Never had any problems
with them.
I've been very very happy with Retrospect so far (at least the Mac version).

*** Now for something completely different ***

I've been thinking of a solution for my problems.  Here it is.

1. Linux samba client for Windows backup.
2. Linux afpfs client (appletalk client) for Mac's
3. Linux backup server program (maybe amanda).

Unfortunately afpfs doesn't seem to be developing anymore.  Works w/
2.2.x though.  Also requires Netatalk to work.
I also don't know if Linux will handle the autoloader we've got.

Interesting problem.

sim