On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Philippe Naudin <philippe.naudin at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com