One problem faced by administrators of large and small networks alike is performing backups. While backups are simple to perform and a variety of software and hardware is available to help, the logistics of reliably archiving even a handful of machines are quite onerous. Having each user backup his or her own computer seems an obvious solution, but is really quite impractical: equipping each workstation and server with its own backup hardware is prohibitively expensive, and asking users to schedule and run their own backups is tantamount to ignoring the problem altogether.
One problem faced by administrators of large and small networks alike is performing backups. While backups are simple to perform and a variety of software and hardware is available to help, the logistics of reliably archiving even a handful of machines are quite onerous. Having each user backup his or her own computer seems an obvious solution, but is really quite impractical: equipping each workstation and server with its own backup hardware is prohibitively expensive, and asking users to schedule and run their own backups is tantamount to ignoring the problem altogether.
So, many administrators favor a centralized approach, where a single computer, the backup server, controls a network-wide backup process. Using this centralized approach, once a system is configured as a backup client, little or no manual intervention is required to perform frequent backups of that system.
Unfortunately, this centralized approach to backups also creates a scheduling nightmare, and can pose authorization problems. You can use NFS or even tar’s own networking features to get the data from each personal computer to the server, but those solutions fail to scale well.
Another approach is to use more specialized network backup software. One such package is the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (or AMANDA), a powerful open source program for performing tape backups of an entire network. You can download AMANDA at http://www.amanda.org.
Principles of AMANDA Operation
For Linux or Unix boxes, AMANDA uses server software running on the backup clients. This…
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