BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    The OSU CIS backup system consists of a set of Perl scripts that
    strive to make it easy and safe to manage backups and restores for
    a number of hosts.  The main design constraints were that it
    should be easy to use, robust in handling errors, complementary to
    human skills and shortcomings, and that it should use native
    backup programs.

    The current version supports full and incremental backups on
    multiple hosts, where backups of many file systems from different
    hosts can be put onto one tape.  It maintains a tape library with
    a free tape pool.  There are safety checks that verify that you
    are using the right tape in the right drive, that backups haven't
    been skipped, etc.  There is support for multiple backup chains.
    There is offsite tape storage support.  Restores are easier since
    the system knows what backups are on which files on which tapes,
    and it will ask you to mount tape X and skip to the correct file
    for you.  You can backup to disk or tape or both.  There's an
    event log so you know who has done what.  It comes with support
    for dump and GNU tar, and its easy to add support for other
    archive programs, like cpio or others.

    This version of the system has been ported to and tested on HP/UX
    8.05, 8.0.7, SunOS 4.1.1, 4.1.3, Solaris 2.1, BBN's Mach 2.5,
    Encore's Mach 1.0, and Ultrix 4.2a.  It should be easy to use this
    on other UNIX platforms, provided that you have installed Perl.  We
    are using Perl version 4.36.

    If you've been using previous versions of this backup system, see
    the *IMPORTANT NOTE* below.

FUN STATS

    We've done at least 14,000 backup runs so far, consisting of
    314,000 individual backup (most done with dump).  We backup 40
    hosts with 6 Exabyte 8200 tape drives in two hours, twice a day.

WHAT'S NEW

    This is version 2.6.  Main changes since 2.5: tape type support,
    full support for online backups, wrote a reference manual, and made
    miscellaneous changes that make the system more flexible than
    before.

MISSING PIECES

    We aren't doing anything about multiple tape support or backup
    verification yet.  For multiple tape support, I'll probably
    provide a choice between tape rollover (several mounted tapes,
    roll to next tape as needed - good for unattended backups) and
    asking the user for help.

    It isn't clear how we should deal with tape rollover between tapes
    on several hosts - neither dump nor GNU tar can easily deal with
    moving from one rmt host to another in mid-archive, though it
    would be simple to set up the backup software to allow one to
    shift from host to host between file systems.  

    There's no support for stackers or jukeboxes yet.  

    See the section on future plans in the reference manual for a longer
    discussion of these topics.

GETTING STARTED

    Print a copy of the manual (doc/backup.ps), and follow the
    instructions in the Installation section.  You should also glance
    over the man pages and the Makefile.  If you didn't know, there's
    a mailing list for folks using this stuff, where you can ask
    questions, discuss problems, and take part in designing future
    versions.  Send mail to backup-request@cis.ohio-state.edu for
    details.  There's also a backup-announce list, which receives
    ONLY announcements about new versions - send mail to
    backup-announce-request to join that.

    *IMPORTANT NOTE* There are many small but important changes since
    version 2.5.  In particular, there are new options in /etc/backups,
    the format of the backup.config file has changed somewhat,
    checkinout has been renamed to move-tape, and there are many new
    options in local.defs and global.defs.  READ the Changes file and
    review your config files carefully!  Please also note that I've
    changed the default names of the database files - you can either
    rename your files to match, or change the definitions in
    global.defs.  I've also renamed the sequence files as well -
    clean-db will automatically deal with this, but you might want to
    rename your *-id* files anyway.  The new names are the same as their
    corresponding database names, with the extension ".seq".
 
WHAT'S WHERE:

    Changes		Describes the change history of the software
    Makefile		Makefile to make it easy to print stuff.
    README		This file.
    Wishlist		List of things to do, bugs to fix, and so on.
    cis/		Misc scripts that you might find interesting.
    doc/		Various documents, including the LISA paper,
			The LISA slides and the backup manual.
    graph/		The optional graph making facilities.
    man/		The man pages.
    misc/		Assorted things you might be missing
			(yagrip.pl). 
    samples/		Sample config files.
    src/		The sources.
    test/		A bunch of test tools.

SPECIAL THANKS

    To the (brave :-) souls who are using this software, and who have
    made so many interesting and useful suggestions.  I'd specifically
    like to thank John Rouillard for his patience, suggestions and bug
    reports, and Sxren Michael Roug for the restore-gtar script and the 
    idea for the pmt script (which has now been rewritten in Perl).

--- Steve Romig, April 10, 1994
