[CentOS] Bacula

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

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