Category Archives: Backups

Thayer Computing Projects

In between keeping all things computing running at Thayer, we always have several projects in the works. Here’s a quick overview of projects we’re currently working on or planning. In no particular order…

Email and collaboration tools

Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.

Hard drive based back up server

We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To [snip...]

Backup Program Chosen: AMANDA

After performance and feature testing AMANDA and Bacula, we’ve decided to go with AMANDA. The speed that AMANDA was able to backup data over the network was nearly twice that of Bacula (80 MB/s compared to 40 MB/s), and AMANDA was slightly faster pushing data to tape (77 MB/s compared to 63 MB/s). The speed advantages that AMANDA showed within our topology were significant enough to warrant it as our backup program of choice. That being said, within other topologies and with different needs, I [snip...]

AMANDA and Bacula: which backup program to choose?

An important part of any enterprise level storage system is the backup system. For our new inexpensive storage system, we want to find a piece of backup software that is both inexpensive (preferably free) as well as functional. My search for such a program has led to two main candidates: AMANDA and Bacula. I’ll start with AMANDA as that is where my testing began.

AMANDA approaches backups by using native programs such as postfix, tar, dump, xfsdump, etc within a client/server relationship. The [snip...]