SUMMARY: Backups when Mediahost != Server

[Mike Jipping]

This has been a while, but I owe a summary to this list...so...

I asked a question about what people do about the situation when the
mediahost for system backups is not the same host as the server.
Situations such as server crashes make me nervous when all my backups are
done on an Exabyte connected to a SS-1 across the net somewhere (our
server is a 3/160).  And the problem becomes more acute when the software
to do the backup uses special formats of their own (e.g., "supersaver") or
non-standard (or innovative) archiving techniques (e.g., "8mmbackup",
which uses cpio).  This is no criticism [no flames please] just a plea for
what works best in a critical backup/restore situation.

I got several replies.  The ones I used:

1) Make a local backup of / and /usr on the server.  When the disk
   crashes, these will help get the server up to the point where dumps from
   the 8mm across the network can be read.  (DEFINITELY A GOOD IDEA.  We had
   a disk problem which resulted in a corrupted root -- BEFORE I backed it up
   to local tape.  OUCH!)

2) Use dump for backups to the Exabyte.  It's not the best, but it's the
   most standard right now.

The other replies were good, but not so useful for our installation.  MANY
THANKS to all who replied, including Henry Clark, Bill Eggers, Leon
Holworth, Edwardo Krell, Ian MaPhedran, Robert McGraw,  Ruth Milner, and
Grenville Whelan.

BTW, to help in using "dump" for Exabyte network backups, Grenville Whelan
from Sun/UK provided me with a very useful Bourne shell script that serves
as a front end to dump -- and can dump any filesystem from anywhere in the
network.  It organizes the dumps on the available tapes -- and can string
your dumps over multiple tapes.  It's useful for ANY tape media, since
it's just a front-end -- we use for our Exabyte with no problem.

The script is called "sundump".  It is available from smaug.cs.hope.edu
(35.197.146.1) as ~ftp/pub/sundump.tar.Z 

      Mike Jipping                        Internet: jipping at cs.hope.edu
      Hope College                          BITNET: JIPPING at HOPE
      Department of Computer Science         Voice: Hey!