In message 17AD4E991EBDD111B6E000A0C99DD8350BA1@ntmail05.pc.sas.com, Alan Phoenix writes:

Has anyone tried using Budtool to backup a netapp?

Yup. We've been using BudTool to backup our F330 for about 5 months. We spent a month or two working the kinks out of it before we let it touch our filer. Here's what we found:

1) BudTool's reporting is horrible. End of story. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either deranged or hasn't actually used the product. Fortunately, if you know Perl, writing a script to parse the logfile and send out a readable report (and page on fatal errors) is fairly trivial.

2) BudTool's built in scheduling could only have been written by a fool who liked GUIs and never actually had to support a backup solution in a production environment. cron and a small shell script handled this problem. (AMANDA has the best backup scheduling in my opinion. Someday there'll be a vendor who picks up on it.)

3) User level restores aren't supported for NDMP and only work for UNIX clients if your willing to throw security out the window. When doing a restore via NDMP, the destination for the restore has to be on a filer. If your users need to be able to restore data from tape, pick another product. If you're willing to pull stuff off tape for them (the GUIs not bad, but not great either) occasionally, then you'll be ok.

4) Having one BudTool server control a directly connected 100 tape DLT400 jukebox, a 5 tape stacker connected to our F330, and a 5 tape stacker connected to our research departments number cruncher is pretty nifty. Having all the tape and file histories in one place is nice too.

5) BudTool has a utility called btcp which will copy all your most current backup requests (Lev 0s and all necessary incrementals) to a set of tapes for offsite storage. It doesn't just dd a bunch of tapes. Very nice. Unfortunately, btcp is a little brain-dead and tries to copy _all_ the requests to one set of tapes. If you have a couple hundred GB worth of backups, this can take a really long time. Again, a little shell script fixed this problem.

All in all, I don't think I've ever been 100% satisfied with any software product. But BudTool gets the job done (with a little help).

jason

--- Jason D. Kelleher kelleher@susq.com Susquehanna Investment Group All opinions expressed are my own, etc, etc...