Fastest and easiest recovery software

[poker9ite]

I have to say that I have not been able to find a better software solution than StorageCraft for windows to do my backups and a full restore in such a short time.
Does anyone know what works similar for UNIX?

[gaulfinger]

That's not one I'm familiar with. What features makes it your favorite?

[Lasseoe]

ShadowProtect from StorageCraft is pretty nice, though not cheap. We're looking at selling it to some customer who require fast BMR, which is what ShadowProtect excels at.
I'm not aware of any tool that works with various UNIX systems, you'd typically need one that's tailored to your particular OS ie. Solaris, HP-UX, Linux.

The bigger UNIX shops will often have all this nearly fully automated.

[QStoss]

What about Rsync? does it do fast BMR?

[Lasseoe]

rsync is just an advanced copy command.

Wikipedia on rsync: "rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. An important feature of rsync not found in most similar programs/protocols is that the mirroring takes place with only one transmission in each direction. rsync can copy or display directory contents and copy files, optionally using compression and recursion."

[gaulfinger]

For flat files, rsync can work quite well, but you have to script your own wrapper around it to manage multiple generations of backups, provide logging and warnings, etc. It's a super transport, but that's all.

It won't grab objects like System State and Services Database, so it won't be a complete BMR solution. It's not going to handle transactional consistency for open files, databases, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that it may not give you a good BMR.

As for speed, it's very efficient in finding changes in flat files and sending only deltas. The first backup will perform slower than other unix copy utilities, say ftp or scp. But after the first backup, changed files and new files are way faster than copying everything all over again.