Hi Arun, Thanks for your elaborate mail. It helped a lot in learning more about the backup solutions landscape.
>In your place, I would encourage your "friend" to join such mailing >lists and forums and ask the questions directly, rather than use you >as a proxy. We were discussing his problem and I found it interesting for many reasons and I decided to dig little deep into it. Considering your advice, I've asked him to join the group and follow this thread. >The best practice for storage/backup is "online" on fast storage NAS >or SAN, then close "inline" on slower disk storage or virtual disks >(tape) and finally on tapes (library). Which part of this spectrum >is your friend interested in? I was thinking that there must exist an open source alternative for Dropbox (except the share feature), which can de-duplicate and compress data before backing it up "online". We have the same data replicated on multiple laptops. So it would be redundant to store the same data again-and-again. My apologies if this looks like another requirement. In future I'll post the requirements separately. >Take a look at amanda and bacula for "library" backup. They are cross >platform but I am not sure about OS X client. Amanda serves most of our requirement. Digging into the source I could see that it compresses and encrypts the data before transferring it to the backup server. It also has plugins for uploading data directly to some of the well known data-centers (Amazon S3 , Rackspace). But the clients are closed-source. So if I'm using Amanda, We'll have to write the clients (windows and OS X) ourself. My first impression of Bacula is that it is not much different from Amanda, but I need to see the source before I can judge. Thanks, dj _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
