karinc@intelisc.iSC.intel.com (Karin Coffee) (03/06/91)
I have completed my installation of the Palindrome software and an Exabyte 8200sx 2.2 Gb tape drive. So far.....it's great! I have been running with an ancient Mountain Tape streaming tape drive and the Mountain Tape Software. Last week I did a complete backup of my data volume (SYS1). It took 50 minutes to backup and 50 minutes to verify, and I had to use 9 tapes to get the 245+ Mb of data. To backup and verify I had to swap all 9 tapes twice. The installation of the Palindrome software was very easy. The instruction manual is very good and easy to read. You can start with a default set of rules to get going and change them if they don't archive your files as often (or too often) for your taste. Installing the Exabyte drive was easy. The only hitch we had was that we thought we had ordered an external drive, and we received an internal drive. Exabyte had the correct one to us within a week. If you order this, I would definitely order the drive direct from Exabyte. Palindrome uses the Exabyte drive, and tacks on an additional $2,000 for the pleasure of having their name added to the drive. So, this afternoon, I ran an automatic archive of the entire file server (both volumes SYS and SYS1). It took 90 minutes, used 13% of one tape, labelled the tape for me, and told me to leave that tape in the drive for a modified backup tomorrow. I am currently running with the default settings, so I will only rotate tapes once per week. Thus far, I have been very impressed with the Palindrome software. It does take approximately 1 mb of space on each volume that you protect with it, but it also performs disk grooming, and will ask you if you want to migrate files if they haven't been accessed (it uses the Netware access bit) for x number of weeks. The default is 12 weeks. In order to get a clean backup it has to run when the network is quiet, and the user that it runs under has to be supervisor equivalent. However, they do offer a switch that runs the archive in "quiet mode". When in quiet mode, the software ignores all input from the keyboard. I plan on continuing to run my autorun files from Mountain Tape so I can kick off a keyworks file at 2am to start the backup. That's my critique of the installation and first running. It appears to be clean and efficient. If you have any questions, feel free to post or email. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Karin Coffee Intel Supercomputer Systems Division Network/System Administration 15201 NW Greenbrier Parkway The LAN Lords Beaverton, OR 97201 karinc@isc.intel.com (503) 629-7693 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
chapman@acf3.NYU.EDU (Gary Chapman) (03/07/91)
There are problems with TNA, which you have not yet encountered; I think initial impressions of such a complex product, used in very diverse environments, are not very useful. Any reasonably competent program may look great upon first inspection... As an experienced user of TNA, let me say there are a variety of significant problems with this software. They say version 2.0 will address many problems and enhancements, but it seems to be in beta-test forever. The company is going to charge a significant upgrade fee to fix bugs and poor design in their software. Let me give one example. Say you have a server with 6000 files, and you have backed it up with TNA. You want to examine or set the rules governing the backup of file 'xxx.xxx'. Since this is one of the last files in your 'catalog', in fact since it is past the 5000 mark, there is no way for you to get to this file with their pretty display of the server's directory tree. The limit used to be 2500, but after sufficient customer complaint, they had the bright idea of upping the limit to 5000. Like so many products designed for the netware environment, no provision was made in the software design for large-scale environments. Pretty ironic for a product designed to use 2.2 gigabyte drives. -- Gary Chapman, New York University
brian@cimage.com (Brian Kelley) (03/12/91)
In article <1177@intelisc.isc.intel.com> karinc@intelisc.iSC.intel.com (Karin Coffee) writes: >I have completed my installation of the Palindrome software and an Exabyte >8200sx 2.2 Gb tape drive. So far.....it's great! It is a pretty good package. We're using it also. >Thus far, I have been very impressed with the Palindrome software. It does >take approximately 1 mb of space on each volume that you protect with it, >but it also performs disk grooming, and will ask you if you want to migrate >files if they haven't been accessed (it uses the Netware access bit) for >x number of weeks. The default is 12 weeks. While it is a very good piece of software, it is not without it's faults. The software likes to put it's index files in a sub-directory off of the root of the volume you're backing up (\TNA). There is currently no way to force TNA to store your indices elsewhere. This causes all sorts of problems: - If the volume you're backing up is full, TNA cannot create it's index data in the \TNA directory. This causes your backup to abort. You can't backup a full volume! - If you want to backup a Read-Only filesystem, TNA cannot create it's index data.. again, no backup... I'd like to put all of my indices in one basket (err, place). While I feel this is a fairly serious limitation, I do like the software and would recommend it. The only other gripe is that (compared to our Suns dumping to Exabytes over the network) it is really quite slow (~3-4 megabytes per minute). >-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > Karin Coffee Intel Supercomputer Systems Division > Network/System Administration 15201 NW Greenbrier Parkway > The LAN Lords Beaverton, OR 97201 > karinc@isc.intel.com (503) 629-7693 >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- --- brian@cimage.com