Re: [gentoo-server] Backup Software

[Bryn Hughes]

I've got bacula running in parallel to my Amanda install (using a 
different tape drive obviously).  So far I'm very happy with it.  The 
Bacula console beats the pants off the various utilities (amadmin, 
amstatus, amcheck) used with Amanda - it's really nice to have them all 
in one place.

The configuration was no more difficult than Amanda although there's a 
lot to the config file.  Bacula certainly seems to be more flexible - 
for instance it doesn't have any trouble queueing jobs, something that 
Amanda cannot do (it just fails the next job to try and start if one is 
already running).  Tape management seems to be much better and more 
flexible as well - last night I had a job run out of tape and was able 
to start up where I left off on a new tape as soon as one was 
available.

I like the concept of separating everything into daemons that run 
independently.  Bacula has a director daemon which controls who is 
doing what, a storage daemon which is the interface between bacula and 
the tape drive and one or more file daemons which run on each machine 
to be backed up.  It can deal with multiple storage daemons and 
multiple hosts.  It appears you could use one director to back up 
different servers to different tape devices connected to different 
machines and still have one central location for managing it all - 
that's the kind of thing I'm really interested in.  Bacula does 
apparently have a gui console although I haven't tried it yet.  The 
text-based console is sufficient for me and does everything I could 
want it to do.

All in all I'd recommend bacula over amanda at this point.  If you have 
a large tape library you almost certainly want to use bacula.  If 
you've got a mixed environment (ie Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, 
etc) then bacula will definitely take care of everything for you.

Bryn


On Mar 22, 2004, at 11:12 AM, Bryn Hughes wrote:

> I'm actually looking very closely at Bacula right now.  Looks like it
> can handle Win32 clients AND Mac OS X clients which is a definite
> improvement over Amanda for me.  Amanda can handle Win32 clients btw
> using samba.
>
> The GUI is pretty low on my priority list.  Being able to support Mac
> OS X clients is way more important to me than having a working GUI.
>
> For those of you who haven't seen Bacula before here's a quick rundown
> of what I've found out so far:
>
> - Uses a MySQL database to record backup statistics, indexes, etc
> - Can back up Unix/Linux/Windows/Mac clients over a network
> - Can append to tapes and span multiple tapes
> - Works with most tape devices
> - Can back up to file or to tape
> - Uses a modular configuration system which seems much better than
> Amanda's
> - Doesn't require xinetd/inetd (yay!)
>
> The bacula home page is here:
> http://www.bacula.org
>
> Bacula seems to be much more flexible than Amanda.  Barring any
> insights from the list before I get home I'm going to set it up using
> a spare DLT drive tonight and see how things go.
>
> Bryn
>
> On Mar 22, 2004, at 10:47 AM, Tobias Orlamuende wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> have you had a look at bacula (bacula.org).
>> I am playing around with it at the moment. It's quite heavy to setup
>> but if
>> it's running it is really useful.
>> The biggest advantage (for me) is the fact that it can backup from
>> Windows
>> (using an agent). AFAIK it is the only OpenSource-tool which can do
>> that.
>> There might be one disadvantage: The GUI provided is nearly unusable
>> in
>> productive environment. Maybe there is coming a new, heavily improved
>> one.
>> IMHO it's worth to have a look.
>>
>> Greetings
>>
>> Tobias
>>
>> Am Montag, 22. März 2004 18:41 schrieb Bryn Hughes:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm wondering what everyone is using to back up their Gentoo servers.
>>> Right now I'm using Amanda which works fairly well but I'm thinking
>>> about changing over to something new.
>>>
>>> My environment:
>>> - 2 servers, about 120 gigs total disk space between them
>>> - a 75G (native) DLT tape library (Quantum 4500 with 15G tapes)
>>>
>>> What I like about amanda:
>>> - network backup, one server controls everything
>>> - point-in-time restore (I can choose to restore a file from last
>>> week
>>> and it will tell me what tape it needs)
>>> - decently reliable after initial setup
>>> - intelligent planning of incremental backups automatically
>>>
>>> What I don't like about amanda:
>>> - can't append to the previous day's tape (lots of tapes that only
>>> get
>>> 15% full or so with incrementals)
>>> - large dumps cannot span multiple tapes
>>> - handling of above results in amanda spending hours writing to a
>>> tape
>>> just to start all over again on the next tape when it runs out of
>>> space
>>> - no GUI
>>>
>>> I want to find something that uses my tapes more effectively and
>>> wastes
>>> less time than amanda.  What I don't want to loose is the indexing
>>> functions and the ability to backup both my servers (and as many more
>>> as I add in the future) without having to actually mount the
>>> partitions
>>> to be backed up to the backup server.
>>>
>>> Anyone have any thoughts?  I've been poking around and I've found
>>> BURT
>>> but that doesn't seem to have any activity since 1999 or so.  Bacula
>>> looks promising also (in fact right now it seems to be the closest to
>>> what I'm looking for).  Anyone have any experience?
>>>
>>> Bryn
>
>
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