On Monday 24 October 2005 12:10, Andy Streich wrote: >On Sunday 23 October 2005 10:20 pm, Steve Lamb wrote: >> > AFAIK, there is not a single vendor of PC's that provides a robust >> > system out of the box that includes a ready-to-go backup/recovery >> > procedure. It's always something left to the user. It's like >> > selling a car without a spare and a jack. >> >> It's a hardware issue. Tell me what piece of hardware you're >> going to presume the user has to back up to. > >But hardware detection is one of the many fine features of the Debian >installer, and I presume burning a CD is the best low-end hardware to > target. > As someone else already pointed out, the hardware used for backups has a far greater variety than there are in generic chipsets for computers.
However, once the hardware is known, it only takes a little while to do a basic 'amanda' install, at which point because it has no idea of the hardware available, its pretty useless. But some time spent reading amanda's manpages, and a few messages asking for additional clarification to the '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' list will usually square the user away. Amanda is the acronym for Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. Personally, I've given up on tapes because both the drives and the media are way more expensive per gigabyte than big hard drives, and amanda can deal with either with equal alacrity when properly configured. When my last DDS2 changer (4gb per tape) ate itself in about a month I bought a 200GB hard drive and use it as a dedicated to amanda batch of virtual tapes. Its faster than tape, easier by far to do a bare metal recovery from, and has given me maybe 0.01% of the errors and general piddling away of half a day here and there that always seems to go with using tapes. >The user I have in mind has a computer for email, websurfing, document >writing, maybe image manipulation and spreadsheets. The current Debian >desktop install serves them well when it comes to providing the means to >create the data they are interested in, but leaves them on their own on > an issue we all know is critical to a well-configured system: backup > and recovery. > > I understand I'm advocating for a feature that isn't going to appear >tomorrow, but it's important to consider it as part of the roadmap. And > it could be yet another way Debian distinguishes itself from the crowd. > The only consideration this user may want to think about when doing automatic, crontab driven, backups is that the machine will need to be left on while amanda is doing its thing, which typically takes about 2 hours to go thru this machine and one client, with a total of about 110GB of data between them. To make the 24/7 operation worthwhile, I'm also doing [EMAIL PROTECTED] and other things to keep it occupied while I'm snoozing. >On Sunday 23 October 2005 09:11 pm, Paul Johnson wrote: >> > Then you are not familiar with the legions of PC users who know >> > nothing of making backups, care a lot about their data, and only >> > realize they should have learned about regular backups when the data >> > turns to toast. >> >> Obviously they didn't care enough about their data to think about how >> to protect it. They got what they had coming. >> >> > It's not that people are lazy (okay, some are) but just clueless. >> >> Cluelessness is a symptom of laziness. > >Cluelessness is a symptom of being inexperienced. Its also an indicator that their lack of experience in howto do these things came from no one reminding them of the dangers, and the best way to fix that is to have them get their feet wet and do it. Then the 'danger' is far less intimidating. We should do the best job of teaching that we can rather than looking down ouir collective noses at the newbees. >Andy -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
