> 5+ years ago the variety of NDMP that was available with the > combination of NetApp's OnTap and Veritas NetBackup did backups at the > volume level. When I needed to go to tape to recover a file that was > no longer in snapshots, we had to find space on a NetApp to restore > the volume. It could not restore the volume to a Sun box, presumably > because the contents of the backup used a data stream format that was > proprietary to NetApp. > > An expired Internet Draft for NDMPv4 says: > > butype_name > Specifies the name of the backup method to be used > for the > transfer (dump, tar, cpio, etc). Backup types are > NDMP Server > implementation dependent and MUST match one of the > Data > Server implementation specific butype_name > strings accessible > via the NDMP_CONFIG_GET_BUTYPE_INFO request. > > http://www.ndmp.org/download/sdk_v4/draft-skardal-ndmp4-04.txt > > It seems pretty clear from this that an NDMP data stream can contain > most anything and is dependent on the device being backed up.
So it's clear that at least the folks at ndmp.org were/are thinking about doing backups using techniques not necessarily based on filesystem. But ... Where's the implementation? It doesn't do any good if there's just an RFC written somewhere that all the backup tools ignore. I was using BackupExec 11d with NDMP Option to backup my Netapp. This setup certainly couldn't do anything other than file selection. I can't generalize and say "nothing does," but ... Does anything? Does anything out there support non-file-based backup via NDMP? _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
