If you run the indexing service for Amanda, recovery is pretty simple. You can use amrecover to interactively build your restore selections and it will prompt for the appropriate tapes. If you leave indexing off, it's a headache to try and figure out where the last full dump and all the incrementals are. Amanda uses dump, tar, or smbtar for windows shares. Dump does a straight physical dump without regard to file structure. I've heard it's a bad choices for modern file systems (haven't really looked, since I use tar). I didn't think the config was too bad; on the other hand, my favorite editor is vi. :-) I second the recommendation of the oO'Rielly book The chapter on Amanda can be found online at http://www.backupcentral.com/amanda.html Dave Alitz Scot Jenkins wrote: >I've used Amanda for a past employer. It works but is very complicated >to setup. It has some advantages that it will try to stream to tapes >and maximize space on each tape, etc, but there's a downside: > >Server A just crash, which backup tape has the last full backup from >which I can restore the entire system quickly? With Amanda, (at least >in the setup we had, where it maximized tape space), the various >filesystems from Server A where put on many tapes and at many different >places on those tapes, depending on what day each filesystem was backed >up. To me, this would be an administrative nightmare if I ever had to >do a complete restore of a system. > >that's my $0.02. > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list