Hello, I'll let "real users" such as Michel Meyers and others answer most of the questions for you, but I thought I'd throw in a few minor comments.
On Tuesday 21 March 2006 21:39, John Goerzen wrote: > Hello, > > I have been using Amanda for backup for quite a few years now. I'm > interested in Bacula and have read through most of the (large!) manual. > Bacula looks like a nice piece of software, but there are several things > that concern me about it. > > 1) In the manual, it states that "if you move files into an existing > directory or move a while directory into the backup fileset after a Full > backup, those files will probably not be backed up by an Incremental." > That's concerning to me and seems a huge hole -- files are moved or > renamed all the time in our environment, and we would want them to still > be backed up. Some other places in the manual, it suggests to copy > instead of move/rename directories. But with a user base of several > hundred people, some of which aren't all that computer-savvy, that is > almost impossible. In the Win32 area, it had another warning about the > same problem, with no apparent workaround other than to copy it. Again, > a serious problem. It seems that, as a temporary solution anyway, it > would be easy enough to just treat files inside moved/renamed > directories as new and back them up. Unless I am mistaken, Amanda mostly uses certain Unix programs like tar for backing up and restoring data. If that is the case, then it (Amanda) suffers from exactly the same problem -- in fact a large number of problems such as Bacula base backups on the date/time stamps, which is the origin of the problem. > > 2) I'm concerned that incremental and differential backups don't notice > deleted files. When we restore from that, we could wind up with > thousands of deleted or renamed files -- *not* an exact image of the > system as of the last backup. That also is a large problem. Same comment as above. > > 3) We perform backups overnight, when no operators are here, so as to > minimize performance impact on our users. We have enough data that it > is not possible to fit a full backup of every filesystem onto a single > tape. However, it is possible to stagger the full backups so that we > guarantee each filesystem is backed up with a full backup once every > three days. Amanda will automatically handle that staggering for us. > Can Bacula? > > 4) Amanda has a nice "degraded mode". If the tape drive is offline, or > there is no tape in the drive, or the tape in the drive is not suitable > for backup, Amanda will run all incremental backups and store them to > disk. The next morning when the operators arrive, they can correct the > problem and run amflush to move the data out to tape. I notice that > Bacula has the ability to spool data to disk, but it doesn't appear to > be able to do that in a nice fashion in the presence of a tape error. > Correct? > > 5) More generally, I am concerned about this notion of continuing to > append to a tape until it is full. We would not know in advance when a > tape will fill up. Simply waiting for the operator to swap tapes, and > then continuing with the backup, is not a workable solution for > performance reasons since we can't run backups during the day. We would > be left with missing a night's backup. Is there any better way we could > use Bacula's nifty append features in our setup? > > 6) And even more generally, are people actually using Bacula in medium > to large organizations? Yes. > Reading about how the author's test network is > using token ring, I don't know where this quote came from, but I don't have a token ring, and I have never had one. > how some sites only have to swap tapes once a month, > and how many are able to keep using the same tape day after day makes me > think that Bacula may not really be suited for a situation in which we > store terabytes of information and back up dozens of machines. Bacula can definitely backup/store terabytes of information from far more than dozens of machines, but whether or not it has the features needed to meet your needs is impossible to answer without indepth knowledge of your requirements. > Is that an incorrect assumption? > > Thanks for all your work on Bacula and its manual. > > -- John Goerzen > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live > webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding > territory! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-users mailing list > Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users -- Best regards, Kern ("> /\ V_V ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
