I'm looking for a backup solution for daily and incremental backups for a single server. This has to be able to cope with a backups that are bigger than 1 tape and allow me to change it.

I'm running Debian etch/Stable and the tape drive is a hpc1537a with tapes of 12gb

I cant use dump reliably as this server will be important and cant afford to have down time for backups.(and too many different drives)

I have tried making a script using tar but cannot get it to cope with multiple tape and overflowing. I would prefer something easy to maintain and automated or usable via cron script

Can anybody help?

My choice would be Amanda. It will span tapes. You can find links here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup (several links through the first page or two of that).

one of the problems i have with amanda is the lack of a gui.
I myself have no issue with this but im only running this system for a year before somebody else takes over,
and then they have to know where it logs and if it completes. im assuming the next person will be a windows user who doesn't know how to use the command line. Do you know of any gui front ends to amanda?

Im trying amanda again if anybody could suggest a gui front end i would be grateful.

Bacula has a GUI tool. But I wouldn't limit yourself to tools with only GUI's, if you ever find yourself without a GUI for any reason, then you're like a rock stuck at the bottom of the creek since you didn't educate yourself in learning some of the basic command lines that come with such tools. Bacula and Amanda both have good command line utilities to control the backups, etc.

And that's what documentation is for. I left a company, setup Bacula for them, none of the other admins even knew any backup terminology and best practices, I documented those for the environment as well before leaving.

And then again, when you leave a company, it's no longer your problem so why should you care that much?

The only reason i care is i've seen the mess caused by the last 5 people who didn't. I assume there is no premade gui for amanda. Oh well have to make one. Thnx all

So you're not gonna even give Bacula a try? So if you spend 6 months or longer making a GUI for amanda, you gonna share it with the community? You could learn the command line options in a matter of days and probably document the procedure in a week but you're willing to make a GUI just to save the next person some trouble in actually learning something? That just seems backwards to me. Oh well, good luck.

I have tried:
tbo
backula
amanda
tar (using home made scripts)

so far amanda is the easiest to set up for backups.

Just FYI, in another thr, someone mentioned dar, which apparently has a kde front-end 'kdar'. No idea if its good for you though.

Sorry I was out for a day or two and didn't catch this exchange when it occurred.

There actually is a GUI for Amanda that is quite good. It was developed by Zmanda as an Amanda extension for the Enterprise Edition of Amanda. I'm not sure what the plans are for code release. I haven't paid quite so much attention to it, because I prefer minimalist approaches where software does what it is supposed to do without extraneous bells and whistles that are secondary to its purpose. But, you could take a look at it, and at the cost of going with the Enterprise Edition (or whether the code is available) and see if it suits you. http://www.zmanda.com.

As far as the next person who becomes responsible for the setup, I would think supporting the systems you have would be part of the job requirements. Anyway, last job I left, I ended up writing about 100 pages of technical documentation just before I left. I wrote it in the form of emails (one per topic or system) to myself, my supervisors, and the new person coming in (we already knew who she was). I also wrote a table of contents for all the emails (sent as an email), and then I printed them all out in triplicate and made a set of three 3-ringed binders -- one for myself, one for my supervisor, and one for the new person.

So, I would do what works for you. Document it. When you leave, you can leave in good conscience, knowing that you left a working system with documentation. What happens after that is the responsibility of others.

Thnx will look into it.

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