Burt Backup and Recovery Tool
Eric Melski, Dean Jansa · 1998
1 Background Burt was born out of the need for a extensible backup and recovery tool. We were faced with the need to backup hundreds of workstations of various flavors of Unix and filesystem types. In addition, we needed to be able to easily support backups for our substantial AFS filespace. Whatever system we decided upon needed to be capable of dealing with future hardware, software, and networking challenges. Finally, the system had to be fast. We backup approximately 55 gigabytes of data every night, and those backups have a window of only several hours to run. For several years, we had been using DK from Tektronix [9]. This tool had many good features, including support for multiplexing, or the parallel backup of several systems simultaneously to a single tape drive; some flexibility in terms of what systems could be backed up; and some general concepts, such as the idea of the system as an engine or tool to achieve backups. However, DK also had a number of shortcomings. The multiplexing support was inflexible and inadequate for our growing installation- it could only handle backing up a few systems simultaneously, and it required that systems be 1