cole@unix.SRI.COM (Susan Cole) (05/17/91)
Here are the responses I received to my request about a month ago for programs to back up Macs or PCs. I've deleted names of the message senders but pretty much left the relevant text intact. I really appreciate all the responses. I hope I was successful in thanking you all personally, but if not -- Thanks! I wrote: >We need a good backup program that will allow us to back up our Macs >and IBM PCs to our Sun (or to a VAX running VMS) over ethernet. Most >of the Macs come in through Gatorboxes. We would prefer to back up >directly to the Sun's tape drive if possible. We have been trying out >Retrospect Remote, but their own rep told us not to try to go to a >non-Mac server because it's too slow. Does anyone know of anything >faster? (1) We're doing something like this here. I'm using a package called "macdump", which was written by Dan Tappan (tappan@mikey.bbn.com). It consists of a Control Panel device (and INIT) called Dumper, which you install on each Mac, and a suite of programs that run on Suns and other BSD Unix systems. The Unix programs depend upon the AppleTalk support in the CAP package (which is free, excellent, wonderful, and indispensable). The Dumper INIT acts as a sort of dump-server... the Mac program "macdump" connects to the server and asks it to start sending the contents of a specified disk. The "macdump" program then creates a Unix disk file containing a hierarchical structure of data which mirrors the Mac file system (topologically... the actual data layout is quite different). You end up with a single large dump-file on the Unix machine (one dump-file per Mac disk dumped), which can be transferred off to tape, or used as input to the "macrestore" daemon and the Mac "Restore" application. I've made some modifications to "macdump", so that it doesn't create a data file on disk. Instead, it simply journals its AppleTalk packets out to the standard output device... typically a pipe which feeds the "dd" program, which blocks up the packets into big chunks and writes them to our Exabyte tape drive. This saves _lots_ of temporary disk space. If we need to restore a file (or a whole Mac disk) I simply locate the correct journal on tape, read it with "dd", and pipe the contents into "macdump" with another option specified... this causes macdump to read the journaled packets and create the indexed disk-dump file. The file can then be read by macrestore/Restore. The backup process takes a while... running through a FastPath-4, we see backup rates of roughly 1 megabyte/minute. Backing up the whole network takes most of the night, and consumes about 50% of our LocalTalk bandwidth. I've set up a vaguely similar arrangement for backing up our PCs, which are networked together using a proprietary 1-megabyte LAN from Invisible Software. We bought a Western Digital Ethernet card, and a copy of PC/TCP from FTP Software. With this software, we can run the "tar" command on a PC, tar up an entire disk (either local, or remotely mounted via the Invisible Software net), and route the tar output to an rmt process running on the Sun. Once again, we use our Exabyte drive. Re the Mac side of things... I suggest that you send a message to Dan at the address above and ask him to send you a copy of macdump. I'll be glad to send you the diffs to create a version which supports tape journalling. (2) I don't know whether this will help & it's only for PC to Sun backup anyway. But. If you have a netmounted DOS disk, perhaps on a special "backup" area of a SUN disk, we have found using XTREE Pro on the PC to be a good & quick method of backing up all or part of a PC Hard disk. With the latest version, you can put a complete DOS disk structure up as one massive zip file and then recover all or part as required. Xtree has facilities for updating or "freshening" the zip file, thereby providing a form of incremental back up. It's a bit of a mental exercise to define the required procedure and select the right xtree options but it can be done. (3) I'm mailing directly to you, since I don't have definite info for you. I believe Cayman makes a program called GatorShare, if not that, another name. (4) Dan Tappan at BBN wrote something called macdump. It allows you to schedule mac backups to the sun. It's a rather nice program in some respects, in that he tries to maximize the network bandwidth by spooling multiple macs to a disk on the sun, while backups up one completed spool area at a time to tape. I'm in the process of attempting to modify it so it won't spool (we just don't have the disk space available on the sun side even to spool only one mac at a time) to disk, but go directly from each mac to the Exabyte we have hanging on the Sun. If you are interested in macdump, I can send you the package (source, man entries, mac side support files). As far as the PCs go, I can't help you there, sorry. (5) Legato Networker is purported to backup PCs, although not MACs. You can contact them at 415-329-7880 (6) Our MIS department did a detailed performance study on Mac backups to other Macs, Vaxes and Suns. The Sun performance was the best. They used Helios software to run AFP. We will be buying a new dual CPU 4/490 with 30 GB of disk space to backup our 700 Macs. We tried other software on the Suns like Pacer and others but nothing else would work. (7) We are currently looking at the same thing... We are looking a UShare and GatorShare. [address for more info deleted in case sender doesn't want it posted.] (8) Hi. This is delayed a bit because I get only the SunSpots digest. What I use to back-up our PCs is 'tar'; part of PC/TCP from FTP Software Inc. It works with Unix, VMS or anything else that has rexecd or rshd, and tar. You can backup to disk or directly to tape. PC/TCP is a pretty complete set of TCP/IP programs for a PC, most of which are duplicates of BSD Unix programs, like: lpr, ftp, ftpsrv, tar, and telnet. They also have PC/TCP Plus, which adds an NFS client. We have a site-license, but I think the single-copy price is something like $300. Unless FTP sells an equivalent program for Macs, I know of nothing similar for those machines. Good Luck. (9) We have used PC-NFS for quite a few years. Our strategy is to just copy the PC's entire hard disk to the Sun machine via NFS, then dump to tape with the Unix "tar" command. The advantage is that you can quickly copy the stuff from the PC, then make the tape backup afterwards. I think that Sun sells a PC-NFS add-on product that allows the PC user to directly access Unix tape drives via the "rmt" protocol. The MAC is a different story. So far, we have only used FTP to transfer files. I just received information from The Wollongong Group about NFS for the MAC, so the story may soon change... (10) Hi, I use FTP TCP/IP 2.04 from a PC (386) with a 3Com 3C503 card: using the tar command you can backup from the PC across the network to the Sun cartridge tape. The command I use on the PC is: tar cvf username@hostname:/dev/rmt8 directory1 directory2 ... About the Mac, check if any TCP/IP vendors support tar like FTP does on PCs. -- cole@unix.sri.com {hplabs,amdahl,rutgers}!sri-unix!cole