Mulad: I had to fiddle with backup solutions twice lately. I first thought using amanda would be perfect, but it turned out to be overkill, as in one case only one machine had to be backed up, in the other case, 2 redundant servers. We use amanda at our student house, with ~ 15 machines, and it is just fine, but for small networks, it is too complicated. I then got the hostdump.sh script from somewhere on the net, patched a few errors it had, but got disappointed by it, as it is tremendously long and complicated and ugly. However, it writes a label file using tar as the first file on the tape. It also writes an index file last. I used the same idea, in one case using the label file only to ask the user if the tape is the correct one, in the other case to parse the file list, and play them back correctly. In one case (the redundant case), I use a simple spool directory, where Tar files get periodically written to, and backed up to tape once a day. A full dump is done each weekend. I also write small ksh scripts so lusers could back up data without destroying the oracle databases and stuff. Hope that helps, I could mail you some scripts, but I don't want to release them, they are just too ludicrous. Sorry for my bad english.