OT: Tape less Backup System

[D. Thomas Podnar]

Jay Wrote
| On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 10:06:44AM -0500, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
| > : > You probably need to look at the full specs.  It also is designed
| > : > to backup multiple systems to a common NAS device is you wish.
| > : 
| > : I saw that, and (also without reading the full spec) said "why won't it
| > : support scp?"
| > : 
| > : Tom?  Does it?
| > 
| > Sigh. It is amazing what you can put into a product, how much time and
| > money you can expend, and then immediately get the "but why can't it do ..."?
| > question.
| 
| Sigh not, good sir.  BackupEdge is my favorite program, and I'm probably responsible
| for about 20 or 30 end user installs myself.

For which we're very grateful. Thank you for trusting us with your data.

| 
| > scp doesn't have the full command set necessary to do what we do. And it
| > copies only full files.
| 
| Hmmm... 
| 
| > BackupEDGE can manipulate the archive directory with the full ftp protocol,
| > It can read the labels from remote archives to rebuild its control file, size
| > remote archives, and restore ONLY the file/files you want from a remote
| > archive, without sending the full archive back across the network/internet.
| 
| The FTP protocol allows you to retrieve *byte ranges*?  I wasn't aware of that.

As a full protocol, it can be manipulated in a lot of ways, if you have a
little imagination ;-)


| > Building ftp/ftps into the backup engine provides a very elegant solution
| > to a difficult problem, if you understand all the potential things that
| > backup software needs to do.
| > 
| > By far most backups will be across the local network, for which ftp backups
| > are well suited. ftps is an excellent protocol for remote backups, and
| > can be further enhanced by using BackupEDGE archive encryption to provide
| > a very robust and secure solution.
| 
| I'm guessing that ftps is *not* sftp... and I have to admit to never having heard of
| ftps.  I guess I'll go look it up.

ftps is "Secure ftp using SSL as a transport". It is not SFTP, which requires
more administration.


The point I was trying to make was that yes, we examine lots of alternatives
before we start making major changes to BackupEDGE. As we see here frequently,
there are lots of ways to achieve most goals, some better than others, and
some that are just brute force, but work.

We picked ftp/ftps as a protocol that was elegant, easy to implement and embed
with the full BackupEDGE feature set for devices, and requiring essentially
NO administration on the ftp server side, other than creating an ftp account.
The last part is especially important when dealing with NAS appliances for
which there may be very little access to the actual operating system.

| 
| Cheers,
| -- jra
| -- 
| Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
| Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
| Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
| St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274
| 
|       If you can read this... thank a system adminstrator.  Or two.  --me
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Thanks again for being a BackupEDGE fan.

Tom Podnar
Microlite