We are presently looking into alternative backup strategies for our
networked servers and are considering Bacula. Does anyone have any
opinions on this application, good and bad, to share? Further, is
there a CentOS4 specific rpm build available for this in a yum
repository (I note that CentOS4 tags have been added to the Bacula
source tree)?
Regards,
Jim
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On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 at 10:25am, James B. Byrne wrote> We are presently looking into alternative backup strategies for our > networked servers and are considering Bacula. Does anyone have any > opinions on this application, good and bad, to share? Further, is > there a CentOS4 specific rpm build available for this in a yum > repository (I note that CentOS4 tags have been added to the Bacula > source tree)?I'm a long time amanda user, so I may be a bit biased. I looked into bacula a month or so ago for 2 reasons -- 1) tape spanning support (which amanda has only in experimental patches, and 2) native ACL support (amanda uses native tools like tar or dump to actually get the bits off the disk, so ACL support is up to them). I decided against bacula pretty quickly, though, because the scheduling facilities of it are, well, non-existent. You have to make all the scheduling decisions yourself. If you're backing up a small-moderate amount of data, that's OK. I backup 4.5TB of formatted space, which just expanded to 10TB. I don't want to decide, for each backup list item, when to do a full and when to do an incremental. Amanda does all that for me, and and does a very good job of it. My $0.02 worth, YMMV, etc., etc.. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
On 8/2/05 7:25 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:> We are presently looking into alternative backup strategies for our > networked servers and are considering Bacula. Does anyone have any > opinions on this application, good and bad, to share? Further, is > there a CentOS4 specific rpm build available for this in a yum > repository (I note that CentOS4 tags have been added to the Bacula > source tree)?Our main backup server runs bacula on CentOS 3. Storage is handled by a Dell PowerVault 122T with a single LTO-1 drive. Obviously, we don't handle a huge amount of data. :-) In general, I like bacula. It works and plays well with our library, automatically swapping tapes as necessary. We currently back up a mix of Linux and Mac OS X hosts with no trouble. Unlike other backup programs I've used, you can specify file inclusions and exclusions with regular expressions, which can be helpful. At the same time, there's no doubt it feels sort of rough hewn. I don't know if it was just our situation or not, but I ended up writing my configuration file from scratch, discarding nearly all of the sample configurations. Once in place, however, the config files are easy to manage with tools like cfengine or rsync. As far as downsides go, there's no native wire-level security. Backups will cross your network in plain text unless you hack in some stunnel support. Make sure your backup server has plenty of RAM; having a swath of local disk for spooling won't hurt either. I should note that, to date, we've relied completely on the command-line tools; I don't have any experience at all with the GUI frontends. -- Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com