Following this list, I noticed this message:
*From: Philipp Storz* <philipp.storz@*****.com> Date: 2017-08-28 9:36 GMT+02:00 Subject: Re: [bareos-users] Always Incremental backups are awesome To: [email protected] [....] Thank you very much for giving positive feedback, as most of the time we only get negative feedback of different kinds, partly even quite impudent which can be quite demotivating. I know very well such a "feeling", as it's very common also here, in my office :-) So I just decided to take away 10 minutes, and write the following. We come from a Bacula deployment (2005-2013, more or less) and then switched to BareOS as of 2013 (more or less; up to now). Our current BareOS infrastructure is not the biggest of the world but... I think it's relevant: - 1 (very old) tape-library with 24 magazines and one LTO3 drive; - 1 (old) tape-library with 24 magazines and two LTO5 drive; - 1 HP-microserver GEN8 (with 4x8TB SATA drives, SW-RAID-10), acting as a (fast/RAID10) FD; - 1 HP-microserver GEN8 (with 4x8TB SATA standalone drives), acting as SD; - an architecture involving different boxes for DIR+DB and three SDs; As of workload, we have: - 44 clients (mostly linux servers; some windows one) - 1 small set of "heavy clients" (our mailserver backends), each one with something like 5M files and 1.5TB of data (messages stored in maildir); - other not-so-much-interesting clients *All the above.... simply ROCKS*! I really cannot imagine our "backup strategy" performed with different technologies. This can sound a bit "biased" as I'm sort of F/OSS addicted and not so much aligned with current proprietary/legacy backup solutions... but.... the couple made by BareOS and Open-Source it's really invaluable (in more than ten years, we had some events requiring us "raw" access to data, and it has always been possible, thanks to the "open-source" model!). Not to mention the feeling of real freedom that I have when thinking to what (and HOW) is stored inside my LTO cartridge or, also, when planning "updates" (HW/SW). Very difficult to explain to non-experts, unfortunatly. As for the "minus" side or, better, as to something that could be improved (in general terms), here are my points: - Virtualization: we're a full open-source shop and, as such, we're (currently) relying on XenServer. Currently we're SNAPSHOTting the VMs and exporting those exports to a central NFS server. From there, when needed, moving the image to the backup archive. Due to such not-optimized model, lots of VMs have the BareOS-FD on-board (so we're backupping DATAs, and not the VM). I know that for VMware environment BareOS support storage-api to have "differential" image-backup: have not tested that. Anyway, I really feel that in the long run, something (don't know what!) need to be done in order to improve the backup effectiveness of open-source environment (I'm thinking to XENServer, to ProxMox and, in general, to those technologies that rely on Linux LVM/FileSystem/Whatever as storage backend). Probably the solution have to be more "storage-driven" then "hyphervisor-drive" (=> we focus on the storage containing the data... and not on the API provided by the hyphervisor). But I don't have clear ideas on this. On a much lower "desiderata" scale, I've also to say that: - Documentation is really high-quality level. It's not common --for me-- to find other Open-Source project with a so-deep and well-structured "manual". Anyway, the fact that just following this very list I "learn" about commands/concepts that I simply missed in ten years... probably means that we need also some other kind of docs (what kind? Don't know...). The above lead me to a final point: - I really think that BareOS is _ENTERPRISE_GRADE_ and, as such, should be approached by experienced technicians or, at least, by people that are ready to.... "suffer" while "doing the hard work". This is clearly stated in the manual: "*if you are new to Unix systems or do not have offsetting experience with a sophisticated backup package, the Bareos project does not recommend using Bareos*". Probably this concept is still not very clear among young BareOS adopters and something could be done to better express the concept (IMHO the problem, here, is that people approaching BareOS/Backup in a professional way tipically lacks the fundamental concepts of such backups technologies and so are simply unable to "get" the idea of complexity behind it. WebUI is one example of this problem: I see lots and lots and lots of people using WebUI for their day-by-day activity. There's nothing wrong with such a choice... despite that in large deployments you simply cannot blindly use a web-interface to manage such a complex thing like a restore from a large backup. From one point, I second the idea that a Web Interface is needed. But from another point, a sort of disclaimer like: "if you don't have an idea about the overal process undergoing your web-clicks... please, don't use it!". Probably a middle step could be improving technologies behind WebUI: I spent some time thinking to this and.... I'm really convinced that by employing a WebSocket between a "server-component" (a daemon written in an high-level language like Python or Perl and talking with the director via a persistent socket connection) and the WebUI could solve _LOTS_ (all?) of the problems caused by the intrinsic stateless model of the web. This, probably, is something to discuss (here? I don't know...) And, to close: - I think, sometime, about "how" to foster BareOS development and as #1 action I would choose: "asking for professional services". Actually, right now, I'm planning a sort of "Backup Infrastructure, 3.0", expanding our disk-based SDs (HP microservers) to bigger boxes like DELL r730XD with lots of drives. Also, a better planning about backup flows (source system => intermediate disks => tapes) is under discussions, here. Those are _exceptional_ topics for a professional-level consultancy service. But we are in Italy. We are also a Public Entities. So it's absolutely complex (to not say "impossible") to get such services from abroad. What can we do? I'm really interested in ideas.... That's all! And don't forget: I'm really convinced that BareOS is something to consider on-par with Apache, Samba, Postfix, Dovecot.... (OK. You got the idea) Cheers, DV -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "bareos-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
