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You have downloaded Burt.

But what is Burt? A reasonable question, to be sure. In a few words, Burt is a parallel network backup system. Its key features are

• speed -- because Burt can backup many systems in parallel, it can often backup data as fast as the target media is capable.
• flexibility -- Burt can backup virtually any kind of system. It can even backup some systems that you might not typically think of backing up. Burt achieves this flexibility through its design and its use of Tcl. Essentially, you write a snippet of Tcl code which initiates a backup of some data. If you can write a snippet of code which does that for a particular type system, you can backup that type of system. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, we use Burt to backup Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, Ultrix, and Linux systems, and we use it to backup data in our AFS filespace.

        In addition to being flexible in terms of what systems are supported,
        Burt is flexible in its implementation.  Since you write the interface
        to Burt, you can make it as elaborate or plain as you want.  You can
        make it a GUI, or you can make it a quick command-line interface.  It
        is all up to you.

        * reliability -- Burt checksums all the data that it writes to tape,
        and when you finish a backup, it reads the data back and verifies the
        checksums to ensure that the data has been correctly written.

So you've downloaded Burt, and it sounds like exactly what you need. Now what? Well, first you should probably read up on it some more. I don't include any but the most fundamental documentation with this distribution, so that people who already know how to use Burt aren't forced to download the docs over and over again with each release. Instead, I maintain a separate archive of documentation online. Please visit the Burt homepage at

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/

and the Burt documentation archive at

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/docs.html

Here you will find documents that will tell you more about Burt, and documents that will help you set it up at your site.

Thanks for download Burt. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Eric Melski
jmelski@cs.wisc.edu
October 15, 1998