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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