On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Philippe Naudin philippe.naudin@supagro.inra.fr wrote:
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.
In this last scenario, dar (http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Features.html) works just fine and don't need any remote agent. It is also at least as fast as Bacula at restore time, provided the "catalogue" is ready.
That looks like a one-off kind of tool. Backuppc/amanda/backula are all frameworks to manage potentially large numbers of targets.
Another interesting thing is Relax and Recover (http://rear.sourceforge.net/ - in EPEL as rear). This is something that you run on a working system to generate a bootable iso with that system's own tools to reconstruct the current filesystem layout (including LVM/md raid, etc.) and restore a backup onto it. It includes a few backup methods internally but with a small amount of work you could integrate your own backup approach into it to get a fully-scripted bare metal restore.