Hello, I'm an Archlinux user planning to migrate to Free/PCBSD soon. At the moment I use Bacula to backup my desktop machine and another (old) laptop.
Moreover, I've collection of archived (scanned) slides and video files which are archived on (atm) 12 LTO-2 tapes with more tapes to be filled in the future. So, considering the above backup hardware (HP Ultrium 448 tape drive) and my backup needs, I wonder whether Amanda might be better option for me? When I say 'better' I think about the following: a) ease of setup and admin work required to maintain the setup I did configure Bacula, created 3 different Catalogs (video, slides, desktop). but I lost in the past my configuration and had to scan all the tapes to restore catalog files which are atm stored in Postgresql database which is another extra requirement to admin. (Let me say that I keep Postgresql just for the Bacula needs. How does Amanda compare here? b) tools for working with the application Bacula has Bat GUI, but I use bconsole and can find my way there, but wonder how does Amanda compare here? c) bare-metal recovery So far, I never did it with Bacula, but I confess that I'm not probably ready either. Is bare-metal recovery easy/difficult with Amanda? d) spanning volumes on more than one tape and appending to the tape I see two unusual (from the Bacula user's perspective) FAQ entries: 1) How do I back up a partition that won't fit on a tape? 2) Why does Amanda not append to a tape? According to the FAQ, answer for 1) seems to be that it's possible since 2.5.0, and it looks that 3.2.x is bringing support to even better level. Correct? As far as issue 2) is concerned, I'm accustomed in Bacula to simply run a job, selecting correct Pool of tapes and Bacula appends new backup to the appropriate tape without much thinking. It looks that Amanda is using different strategy, and the following confuses me (from http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:Why_does_Amanda_not_append_to_a_tape%3F): "...Amanda was designed to never overwrite a non-Amanda tape, nor an Amanda tape from a different configuration, nor an Amanda tape from the current configuration that is still "active", i.e. has backups on the tape more recent than the dumpcycle length." Bacula also has 'file retention' parameter, but here I'm confused with interchange of the words 'append' (as used in the FAQ entry) and 'overwrite' as used in explanation? So I'd appreciate if someone can throw some more light on it helping with the final decision. Anything else which I did not include which might be worth of comparing? Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA
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