jwright@cfht.hawaii.edu (Jim Wright) (07/26/90)
On that elusive search for a good network backup program... We called Fifth Generation about FastBack II, and this is what we found out: | Turns out it is a | tape drive with a 186MB cartridge plus the software to run it. You get | the whole deal for an educational discount price of $767.25. Their tech | support people said it will definately backup all the network info, but you | have to shut down the file server to do it. I can see a reason for shutting down the server, and we could probably live with it. But it would be better if we had a choice of "live" or "static" backup. We also have a number of syquest drives, and would like to backup to them. Finally, we need to be able to perform the backup from a workstation rather than the server (which has no monitor/keyboard/ mouse). Is there anything out there that will work? -- Jim Wright jwright@quonset.cfht.hawaii.edu Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corp.
Beattie@SYSTEM-M.PHX.BULL.COM (Art Beattie) (07/26/90)
We use the Memorybank facility. This includes a 1 giga-byte disk drive from Northern Telcom (supposedly the same disks used in telephone COs), a tape drive from Exabyte that uses 8mm video tape which will hold about 2.3 GB, and software. Both units are mounted in one cabinet and use SCSI for interfacing. The disk space can be partitioned. The software sets up 20MB for a system partition. The rest is up to the user. We are currently using 2 of these cabinets. They can be used for AppleShare file servering or as a private external SCSI drive. The software that comes with this hardware supports volume dumping and file/folder dumping. Volume dumping is just pipelining the data from the disk to tape. File/folder dumping walks the hierarchy dumping each folder and file and keeping them separate on the tape, unlike volume dumping. Tapes written with a volume dump will only be good when you need to restore a whole disk or partition. The file/folder tapes are useful for restoring individual files or folders to cover the times a user accidentally deletes something or needs some previous version of a file/folder. The current software also allows either workstation or server file/folder backups. However, it will only perform these backups if both the unit doing the backup and the unit being backed up are in the same zone. I am pressing to get this changed. While the dump is in progress, the user cannot not use their Mac. This is not too unreasonable as the backup does allow for a verification cycle. Also, its not good to be backing up a file that could be changed by the user at the same time. One of the options is to send out warning messages to the users being affected. Takes just over an hour to dump without verification 76 MB when both units are connected via ethernet connections (much longer if LocalTalk is used!). The software can also run on top of AppleShare to do file or volume backups of the same device it is using. The only time that AppleShare privileges are retained is when the device is volume dumped, not when it is file dumped. This will probably change with Sys7. AppleShare has to be shutdown in order to do volume dumping. Volume dumping is quicker than file dumping, just over 3 hours with verification. A total file dump with verification of the same disk takes about 18 hours, definitely a weekend exercise. These times are for a disk that is not full; there is currently about 753 MB in use. Hope this is of some use. We have no interest in the vender of this product except as a customer of theirs. Art Beattie Bull HN Information Systems Phoenix, AZ