On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 10:38:09AM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
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.
I've also used amanda in the past, and looked into bacula for the tape spanning support as well. However, I was not turned off by having to setup the schedules manually, and have been using bacula for several months to backup ~15TB. Aside from the tape spanning support (which I think is maturing in amanda), I've found having the catalog in a true database to be a great feature, particularly when a user inevitably request files (the names of which they only vaguely remember) be restored.
Cheers, Bryan Cardillo Penn Bioinformatics Core University of Pennsylvania