If you have a single Linux file server that you want to back up, and maybe a client or two, you can use the full featured Arkeia for free. This is particularly useful for home use, or if you are migrating to Linux in your shop and wish to just back up one server. Arkeia also offers more sophisticated options that cost money. For those of you running Exchange, check out this whitepaper from Arkeia about backing up Exchange. The cool thing is that the free version doesn’t expire. If you want to install Arkeia for use with a tape library, you can get a 30 day trial version to see how it works. One final point about Arkeia is that they have consultants and training available for their product. Think about the scenario where your underpaid and underappreciated Sysadmin leaves. How many people do you have that can debug the custom backup scripts or fix the Amanda configuration if needed? What happens when corporate decides to lay off the spendy folks in your department without consideration for who might get things running again in case of data loss? A tip from us at NetAdminTools: make sure that you have a documented restore procedure w/ included software that anybody capable of installing Windows95 can follow. Test it with your Jr. level Sysadmins. Make sure that your corporate data can be restored.

We installed, configured, and tested Arkeia on our file server here at NetAdminTools in about an hour. It is much, much easier to get running than Amanda, although (compared with the free version of Arkeia) Amanda can handle many more servers, jukeboxes, etc. and is free *and* Open Source. The first step is to install the RPMs. We are running Red Hat on our file server, so this was the easy route. There are other binary distributions available from Arkeia. Install the RPMs:

rpm -Uvh arkeia-client-4.2.15-1.i386.rpm
arkeia-client               ##########################
rpm -Uvh arkeia-server-shareware-4.2.7-1.i386.rpm
arkeia-server-shareware     ##########################
rpm -Uvh arkeia-gui-4.2.7-1.i386.rpm
arkeia-gui                  ##########################

Notice that this installs a crontab entry for root:

[root@mondo local]# crontab -e
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * 
/usr/bin/ARKPER 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null 

Our file server doesn’t have a console on it, but it is simple to run the GUI on another X workstation by:

[root@mondo bin]# export DISPLAY=u-1:0.0

On the workstation, allow the host name or IP address:

root:/etc# xhost +10.50.100.72

Of course, you can also install the client and administrative GUI on any workstation on your network. Do follow the quickstart PDF file from Arkeia all the way through. We had to use a different command to start up the admin client, though:

[root@mondo bin]# ./arkx &

Here is a screen shot of the administration GUI.

Here is a screen shot of a backup job window.

All in all, we are quite impressed with the ease of use of Arkeia. Further, the licensing policies, and support available for Arkeia make it a tempting solution for many shops that can’t afford Veritas.