Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Right. Because there's a million and one gatchas to watch out for, and 
> you've somehow covered them all with just a simple shell script.

It's really not all that hard. :-)  The tools are there.  If you don't want 
them, then fine, but it's based off of someone who wanted to back up several 
hundred desktop machines that had never been backed up onto a couple of 
central servers over the course of a couple of weeks, so, yeah, it handles a 
lot.

Look at robocopy, for example, and you'll see it'll mirror an entire 
directory tree including junctions and auditing properties and everything 
else, including network failures, it'll run and watch for some number of 
changes and redo the backup when it gets there, etc.

Then look at vshadow and see how it'll take a snapshot of a running drive 
and expose it under a different letter.

Of course it can fail. It's not going to fail silently without you knowing it.

> In a giant database file. (It wouldn't surprise me if it's a JET 
> database...)

That would be messy, but I'm guessing that vshadow tells exchange and/or jet 
to flush their changes so at least you get a consistent and correct file in 
the backup. (That's the sort of thing that I was saying UNIX doesn't make 
trivial, even tho you can copy open files.)

>> The tools are there to do this. They're not that hard to understand.
> 
> Sure. It's called professional backup software. And it costs lots of 
> money. Because they can..

If you're going disk-to-disk, it doesn't cost all that much.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

Post a reply to this message