3.11 System backup

In this section, we discuss backup solutions available for Linux on pseries. We describe the installation of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) in 8.3, "Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)" on page 406. In addition to commercial solutions, there are many UNIX built-ins , such as tar, cpio or pax, which can be used for local, tape or network backups .

For network backups, we can also use rsync . It transfers data compressed and through ssh, it can be used to make incremental and rotating backups. Some generic examples for using rsync as a backup tool can be found at:

http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html

There are also many scripts that utilize rsync to do more comfortable and sophisticated network backups:

RIBS is available at:

http://rustyparts.com/scripts.php

rsync-backup is available at:

http:// freshmeat .net/projects/rsync-backup/?topic_id=137%2C861

duplicity is available at:

http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/

Using amanda for backup

The amanda (or Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) backup system, allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. amanda is open source software distributed under BSD license.

The home page of amanda is:

http://www.amanda.org

Despite the lack of a sophisticated graphical interface, amanda is a competitive product widely used in Linux environments.

Using storix for backup

One of the commercial backup solutions available for 64-bit PowerPC Linux is storix. You can visit the storix homepage and download an evaluation version of the software:

http://www.storix.com

It worked fine on our test system, except that we were not able to create bootable rescue CDs, which is an outstanding feature from this software.

Figure 3-14. storix running a backup job