Hey folks,
I just went through the archives to see what people are doing for backups,
and here is what I found :
- amanda
- bacula
- BackupPC
- FreeNAS
Here is my situation : we have pretty much all Sun hardware with a Sun
StorageTek SL24 tape unit backing it all up. OSes are a combination of
RHEL and CentOS. The software we are using is EMC
NetWorker Management Console version 3.5.1.Build.269
based on NetWorker version 7.5.1.Build.269
The pickle we are in right now is that this software is Java based, and
stops working at a very specific release of JRE (1.6.26 or something like
that). We still have some machines around with that release and it looks
like we need to keep at least 1 of them, but this is clearly not a long
term viable solution.
In the end I want to get our central IT group to take over our backups if
possible (we are a bit of an island outside of central IT), but as I pursue
that path I also want to pursue a 2ndary path assuming they will say
"no".
I am familiar with BackupPC and will look at the other recommendations
above. I think that Bacula and Amanda are sort of the drop-in replacements
for what we have now so I'll look at them most closely. But if I do have
to carry forward with our own backups I'd ideally like to get out of the
tape game - never liked tapes.
Anyway, since the last big backup discussion was over a year ago I figured
I'd kick off another one to see if anything new has come up in the mean
time.
What are the current recommendations?
cheers,
-Alan
--
?Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV?
- Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"
> NetWorker Management Console version 3.5.1.Build.269 > based on NetWorker version 7.5.1.Build.269 > > The pickle we are in right now is that this software is Java based, and > stops working at a very specific release of JRE (1.6.26 or something like > that). We still have some machines around with that release and it looks > like we need to keep at least 1 of them, but this is clearly not a long > term viable solution.I'm pretty sure I saw a note on the networker list that 7.6 SP3 works with update 27, update 29, and java 7.
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:> > Here is my situation : we have pretty much all Sun hardware with a Sun > StorageTek SL24 tape unit backing it all up. ?OSes are a combination of > RHEL and CentOS. ?The software we are using is EMC > > ? ?NetWorker Management Console version 3.5.1.Build.269 > ? ?based on NetWorker version 7.5.1.Build.269 > > The pickle we are in right now is that this software is Java based, and > stops working at a very specific release of JRE (1.6.26 or something like > that).That sounds like something that can/should be fixed.> > I am familiar with BackupPC and will look at the other recommendations > above. ?I think that Bacula and Amanda are sort of the drop-in replacements > for what we have now so I'll look at them most closely. ? But if I do have > to carry forward with our own backups I'd ideally like to get out of the > tape game - never liked tapes.If you want mostly-online backups with perhaps an occasional tar archive, it will be hard to beat backuppc because of it's storage pooling and ability to run over rsync or smb with no remote agents. For all-tape, I'd probably go with amanda because of its ability juggle the full/incremental mix automatically to fit the available tape size. I haven't used bacula but it looks like it might be good if you want a mix of online and tape storage and can deal with the agent installs. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Alan McKay wrote:> Hey folks, > > I just went through the archives to see what people are doing for backups, > and here is what I found : > - amanda > - bacula > - BackupPC > - FreeNASYou missed rsync. <snip> mark
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:> Hey folks, > > I just went through the archives to see what people are doing for backups, > and here is what I found : > - amanda > - bacula > - BackupPC > - FreeNAS > > Here is my situation : we have pretty much all Sun hardware with a Sun > StorageTek SL24 tape unit backing it all up. ?OSes are a combination of > RHEL and CentOS. ?The software we are using is EMCMy non-tape solution of choice is definitely rsync => box with ZFS, snapshot however often you'd like. => forever incrementals. For more redundancy and performance, add more ZFS boxes, do replication between them. For tapes, I'd go with Bacula, but my intermediate storage will probably be ZFS anyway, for easy management of filesystems. I like creating one storage device per client as per this amazing write-up by Henrik Johansen: http://myunix.dk/category/bacula/ I'd choose Bacula mainly for experience and being comfortable with it. In this setup, I'm used to managing it all with Puppet:>From server to client to storage agents as well as creating individualzfs filesystems for each client on the storage server. I had to patch the puppet zfs provider a while back to make it work on FreeBSD. For Bacula, there now exists an awesome (modern) web interface, with ACL support and all: http://webacula.sourceforge.net/ Good luck. -- Mike