[CentOS] Best backup software for linux

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 at 2:21pm, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote

> Nathan wrote:
>> We are running backup softwares for incrementals/differentials and full 
>> backups with variouse softwares currently using dirvish scripts + amanda .. 
>> what is everyones views on other opensourced backup software? is there 
>> anything better or other options we have missed?  We are looking at backula 
>> as an option? any thoughts?
>
> I wanted to recommend you to take a look at Bacula, than I saw it is already 
> on your list.  Bacula is very nice peace of software.  It can do almost 
> everything that very expensive products from Veritas and Legato do.  The only 
> thing it is missing is a nice GUI.  You'll need to configure it using your 
> favorite text editor.  It can be a bit complex to configure, however it does 
> come with good default configuration files that you can use to build on. 
> However, you should read documentation and really understand how Bacula works 
> before deploying.  It is much more powerful and therefore also much more 
> complex system than Amanda.

I'd take a bit of an issue with your last statement, there.  Amanda's best 
feature is its *very* powerful scheduling algorithm.  Essentially, amanda 
tries to ensure that, within the parameters you set for time between 
full backups, each night's backup run backs up about the same amount of 
data.  This is very handy when you are, as I am, backing up ~10TB of data 
to small (even LTO3 is small when you're talking that much data) tapes.

AFAICT, all scheduling with bacula is user driven.  Thus you end up with 
the traditional *nix incrementals on weekdays, fulls on the weekend 
shuffle where your fulls can take a *long* time.  And that doesn't work so 
well, e.g., when you're dealing with grad students who work on weekends.

If I'm wrong about bacula's lack of any sort of scheduler, I'd be happy to 
hear about it.  But, for me, amanda is a rather powerful and complete 
solution -- moreso than bacula.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University