[CentOS] Bacula

Tue Aug 2 15:15:16 UTC 2005
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

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