On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Gour <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
Hello Gour,
I'm a long time FreeBSD and amanda user. I use amanda to backup a
series of desktop boxes. I can't compare with Bacula, as I've never
used it, but let me provide some comments based on my experience with
amanda:
> 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?
I only configured a weekly backup run, but there's ample of
flexibility to include/exclude different partitions (each with
different priorities) from each box, so I assume something similar can
be done with amanda.
In my case I've never relied on external databases, only the (text?)
files that amanda creates. And in any case, I've never really used any
of the amanda admin tools anyway (see my response to your 'bare metal
recovery' point)
> 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?
Can't tell, don't use much of the amanda tools myself.
> 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?
amanda writes all backups to tape in a way that greatly facilitates
recovery from a barebones box, even without having amanda installed.
In fact, I've always recovered backups using standard dd, together
with tar or restore. For this, it is always a good idea to print an
updated label for each tape, and have the label together with the
corresponding tape. That way, even if you don't have access to the
amanda files that tell you which dump lives in which tape, you will be
able to find the correct tape.
For amanda, all backups in tape are preceded by blocks of 32 kbytes
that contain clean text information on the partition, host, date, type
of backup, etc, AND with instructions on how to restore the backup.
You can dump any of these blocks to the screen when reading the tape with dd(1).
e.g., for the first FreeBSD non-rewinding tape devide (nsa0)
[fernan@taper] dd if=/dev/nsa0 bs=32k count=1
AMANDA: FILE 20050423 rho /usr/local lev 0 comp .gz program /sbin/dump
To restore, position tape at start of file and run:
dd if=<tape> bs=32k skip=1 | /usr/bin/gzip -dc | sbin/restore -f... -
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
32768 bytes transferred in 1.825817 secs (17947 bytes/sec)
This tells us that the next file in the tape is a backup of the host
named 'rho' corresponding to the '/usr/local' partition, which was
done by dump(1) on April 23rd, 2005. Then, if we want to restore this
next file, we're just positioned in the right place, at the start of
the next file, so we just need to run
[fernan@taper] dd if=/dev/nsa0 bs=32k | /usr/bin/gzip -dc | sbin/restore -i -f -
> d) spanning volumes on more than one tape and appending to the tape
Never did this myself, I'm sorry.
Hope this helps. I'm sure others will chime in with more details.
Cheers,
--
fernan
