[TriLUG] Tabe Backup Software

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Tuesday, April 22, 2003, at 01:12 AM, Chris MacLeod wrote:

> Veritas is the grand pubah of backup software.  It will do everything
> you would want it to do and probably much more,
[snip]

That is unless, of course, you're trying to back up any files larger 
than 2GB in size.  Known bug with the Linux NBU, been around awhile, 
and I'm not aware of any fix (indeed, we probably would have heard by 
now because we put the brakes on a deal with Veritas due to this killer 
bug).  Not everyone needs to deal with files of this size but I do.  If 
you run a large-ish RDBMS and back up via dumps to the filesystem, this 
could very well hit you.

> I would shy away from Legato and Arcserv, having run into both of these
> beasts in my admin life, they are both ****** and expensive.

If you ask me all the big ones are crappy & expensive.  Yes, Veritas is 
crappy with the rest of them.  This software eval left both the other 
UNIX sysadmin & I feeling like the tape backup software market leaves a 
lot to be desired (especially for the princely sums that they're all 
demanding).  Picking the hardware was a pleasure and picking the 
software was like choosing among slow manners of painful death.

Veritas is probably the least crappy in terms of usability (but still 
crappy) but has that deal breaking bug with large file support.  
Veritas does seem to have the open source tools available to handle 
custom reporting and some other functions (via perl modules).  Veritas 
is a very successful company and they know it.  Unless you are the CIO 
of a Fortune 100 company, expect to be treated like dirt.  Your bugs 
may or may not get fixed.  They can live without you and they know it.

Legato is very painful to set up recipes for.  The interface is really 
clunky.  Once it is up & running it works ok.  This is what we ended up 
buying.

Another option that wasn't mentioned is Syncsort Backup Exec.  We use 
Syncsort's sorting tools and they are quite good.  The backup software 
is immature, though, and leaves much to be desired.  What all of these 
backup utilities have in common (and is very evident with Syncsort too) 
is that they let programmers design the UI.  I really wish they'd hire 
interface specialists and let them tell the programmers what kind of UI 
to program rather than let the programmers write what makes sense from 
their perspective.  Anyway back to syncsort.  If you evaluate syncsort 
make sure to run the GUI tools either on a Linux machine directly, or 
exporting your display to a Linux machine.  You can't.  It's broken.  
You get the splash screen and then it dies.  FWIW my OS X Powerbook can 
handle the Syncsort GUI, as can my co-worker's NetBSD desktop.  Still, 
we're primarily a Linux shop and this is a deal breaker.

> If you are
> going to spend the bucks go with Veritas,

I would disagree with that, but if I agreed I'd make the word "bucks" 
superlative.  i.e. "If you're going to spend the most bucks..."

> Veritas uses tar as well.

Not in all cases.  There is this multiplexing feature that they've been 
pushing that will require you to use Veritas for recovery if you use it.

I've been very much left feeling violated and dirty after dealing with 
tape backup vendors.  It's really high time that an open source project 
with a high quality UI and enterprise features (library support, 
multiple drive support, SAN support, NDMP, etc) rise up.
- --
"When we say `War is over if you want it,' we mean that if everyone 
demanded peace instead of another TV set, we'd have peace." -- John 
Lennon
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