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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - 13th Systems Administration Conference - LISA '99

Burt: The Backup and Recovery Tool

Eric Melski, Scriptics Corporation

Abstract

Burt is a freely distributed parallel network backup system written at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is designed to backup large heterogeneous networks. It uses the Tcl scripting language and standard backup programs like dump(1) and GNUTar to enable backups of a wide variety of data sources, including UNIX and Windows NT workstations, AFS based storage, and others. It also uses Tcl for the creation of the user interface, giving the system administrator great flexibility in customizing the system. Burt supports parallel backups to ensure high backup speeds, and checksums to ensure data integrity. The principal contribution of Burt is that it provides a powerful I/O engine within the context of a flexible scripting language; this combination enables graceful solutions to many problems associated with backups of large installations. At our site, we use Burt to backup data from 350 workstations and from our AFS servers, a total of approximately 900 GB every two weeks.
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Last changed: 13 Feb 2002 ml
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