BackupEDGE 2.1

By Tony Lawrence
2005-05-03

URL's and Filesystem Resources

The other new features here are related: you can back up to a file system (local or attached) or any ftp server. I put that feature to good use at a site where the tape drive died recently. This is a big, big system and it would take time to get a new tape system and nobody wanted to shut it down anyway. Instead, we reconfigured the backup to go to an NT ftp server instead - that machine has a working tape drive, so BackupEDGE sends its files there. At another site, we did the same thing because a DVD ran out of space - but this time we used a Mac OS X machine that has a REV drive attached. The flexibility of this is simply wonderful.

You can even do bare metal restores from a backup made this way. For my two office machines, I have each configured to use the other for a secondary backup in addition to the DVD and REV backups they do. The REV machine defines a more limited domain because not all of it could fit on the smaller machine (and that machine cannot backup as much with it's DVD-RAM anyway). But the net result is that I can recover from removable media OR the other machine. If I wanted to (and had a good hi-speed link), I could do an FTP backup to a machine on the other side of the world - and do a bare metal restore from it if necessary!.

You don't have to be concerned about any file size limitations on the receiving ftp server: if it can handle a 2 GB file, everything will be fine, because the backup is broken up into segments less than 2GB.

You control the number of distinct backups by assigning a "slot name" to a backup. For example, if Monday's backup had a slot name of "Mon" and Tueday used "Tuesday", you'd only get five backup sets on the ftp server. If you used just two slot names and alternated them. you'd only get two. And of course if your slot name used the actual date for its name, well, you had better have a pretty big ftp server.

When you go to restore from a resource, even if you do it from the command line ("edge xvf rev0", for example), you are presented with a listing of what's available:

 # edge tvf net237

Microlite BackupEDGE Enhanced Data Archiving System

(c) Copyright 1997-2005 by Microlite Corporation

    All Rights Reserved

BackupEDGE Registered End User: A.P. Lawrence

Serial Number: TIF20000053

Please select a segment number to read.



[1] key.mail.2005/01/27 Edge.Nightly 02.01.00+ Decryption Key Backup mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/27 06:07:28

[2] ftp237_master.4 Edgemenu 02.01.00+ Master mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/27 06:15:00

[4] ftp237_master.5 Edgemenu 02.01.00+ Master mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/28 06:15:00

[6] ftp237_master.6 Edgemenu 02.01.00+ Master mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/29 06:15:00

[8] ftp237_master.0 Edgemenu 02.01.00+ Master mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/30 06:15:00

[10] ftp237_master.1 Edgemenu 02.01.00+ Master mail.aplawrence.org 2005/01/31 06:15:00

[Q] Quit



Please enter the segment number, letter, or I# for info.

Selection? 



That uses slot names of "%N.%w", which is the name "ftp237_master" and the day of the week:



%n: machine hostname (no domain name is included)

%N: name of scheduled job

%S: second

%M: minute (00-59)

%H: hour (00-23)

%w: day of the week (0 is Sunday, 6 is Saturday)

%d: day of the month (01..31)

%j: day of the year (000..365)

%m: month of the year (01..12)

%Y: year (CCYY)

%y: year (YY)

If you have the encryption supplement, and if your FTP server supports it, you can use ftps instead of ftp. Confusingly, the current version offers this as "sftp" - it is not sftp, it's ftps, ftp over SSL. I think it would be nice if they added actual sftp as a choice here also: that's much more commonly available nowadays..

Filesystem backups and attached filesystems use the same concept of under 2GB segments and slot names. The difference is that attached file systems ask you to specify mount and unmount command. Neither of these backups can be used for bare metal restores - use ftp backups for that.

Tutorial Pages:
» BackupEDGE 2.1
» New Features
» Encryption
» How do I know it's Really Encrypted?
» URL's and Filesystem Resources
» Dislikes

© Copyright 2005 A.P. Lawrence

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