Here is summary of the information I received from my question about Backup Copilot (thanks to all that responded):
***** Brian Kelley - bkelley@pms001.pms.ford.com
if you'd like a ton of info on the design and productization of Backup
CoPilot, I suggest you obtain a copy of the Large Installation Systems Admin
V proceedings. There are several papers on that (and other) backup systems.
You can order the proceedings from Usenix.
***** RichardT - richardt@apple.com
I have had very good experiences with NetWorker, although dealing with
Legato (the manufacturer) tends to be annoying.
***** Mike Pearlman - canuck@rice.edu
Delta Micro's budtool is designed to backup a heterogenous network, NOT just
suns. It uses whatever the underlying "backup" program is on the system. Thus
you can tell budtool to use the "dump" that comes with co-pilot. I think that
budtool is overpriced and the annual maintenance is too high. I use budtool,
there support people are responsive. However, when a new release comes out
and you are on maintenance then you need to call and order it, you do not
get it automatically. Also, each major release seems to require resetting
up the backup database.
Backup copilot has two great features
1) dump and restore are faster
2) it supports SAFE on-line dumps
My recommendation, if you can afford it purchase both Copilot and budtool, run
budtool on top of Copilot. One remark, be sure that you get Delta's device
drivers if you purchase budtool.
***** Annonymous conversation (thanks Mark)
I seems that Backup Copilot replaces the original dump and restore on the Sun system, allowing dump to lock the file it is backing up to preserve its integrity at that moment. This is all well and good unless you have a mutli-file database (or similiar) in use and one of the files is locked while the others change.
Rule of thumb:
The only 100% safe, reliable backup is a single-user, level0 backup.
(Not exactly practical for weekly or daily but tolerable for monthly or upgrades.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:36 CDT