[OpenAFS] Backup & AFS

[Dave McMurtrie]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Jason Garman wrote:

> What are people using for backup of AFS volumes?  We're looking at either
> Omniback or Veritas NetBackup.  We just spoke with Veritas yesterday, and
> they are dropping support for backup of AFS volumes as of the latest
> version of NetBackup (not to mention that they wouldn't have officially
> supported OpenAFS to begin with).
>
> Is there a large enough contingent of people here using Veritas to
> convince them to reinstate support for AFS?  Or, is anyone using Omniback,
> and if so, what kind of scripts are you using for backup?

We're using stuff that we wrote ourselves.  Basically, we just vos dump
everything to local disk from a designated AFS client and back up the
dumps as local files using whatever backup software our backup admins
decide to implement.

We're doing this despite the fact that we bought Veritas Netbackup which
was supposed to be able to read AFS vice partitions and back them up
natively.

While it may seem stupid to write our own stuff despite Netbackup being
able to do the job, there were a few different reasons for our decision to
do this:

1. Our AFS people and our backup admins are 2 different groups of people.
We really didn't want our backup admins to have any reason to log on to
our AFS fileservers.

2. We didn't want to have to install Netbackup on every one of our AFS
fileservers and open up the stuff in inetd that it requires because we
simply didn't trust it.  I also think someone may not have wanted to buy
the licenses, but since I don't deal with the money here I don't know that
for sure.

3. We didn't trust Veritas Netbackup to go anywhere near our vice
partitions.

4. If our backup admins decide to change which server software they want
to support again, it's easy for us to change our stuff to deal with it.

-Dave
--
Dave McMurtrie, Systems Programmer
University of Pittsburgh
Computing Services and Systems Development,
Development Services -- UNIX and VMS Services
717P Cathedral of Learning
(412)-624-6413