[Bacula-users] Considering move from Amanda
Hello all, I've been having some trouble lately with the newer versions of Amanda - we had been running it for about five years and on the last upgrade we've found that it's not quite as robust as it used to be (at least in our environment). When we originally settled on Amanda I did look at Bacula but the project was too young for us to consider. It appears now that it is much more mature and going in a good direction, so we'll be giving it a shot. I've got a somewhat short list of questions... -I'm still digging through the docs, but it appears that scheduling is one of the main differences between amanda and bacula. Amanda tries to spread full dumps out over time, but it appears bacula leaves this up to the operator. Is that correct? -Are there any issues running the current stable release on FreeBSD 4.11? We do need to upgrade to 6.2 and are doing it slowly, but for the time being we're stuck running 4.11 on the majority of our hosts. -Amanda calls gtar or dump on the clients. Does bacula use an external program like this or does the client daemon directly access files? I'm also unclear on the differential backup scheme - in amanda I only have full or incremental... -For now I'll be using the SQLite backend. Is it simple to move to PostgreSQL at a later time? Lastly, anyone here who has already made the switch, I'd love to hear about how that went and what prompted you to switch. You'll probably here more from me over the next week as I try to get this up and running and taking over our archival backups... Thanks, Charles - This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Considering move from Amanda
Charles Sprickman wrote: Hello all, I've been having some trouble lately with the newer versions of Amanda - we had been running it for about five years and on the last upgrade we've found that it's not quite as robust as it used to be (at least in our environment). When we originally settled on Amanda I did look at Bacula but the project was too young for us to consider. It appears now that it is much more mature and going in a good direction, so we'll be giving it a shot. I've got a somewhat short list of questions... -I'm still digging through the docs, but it appears that scheduling is one of the main differences between amanda and bacula. Amanda tries to spread full dumps out over time, but it appears bacula leaves this up to the operator. Is that correct? Strictly speaking, up to whoever does the configuration, which may or may not be the operator, but yes. Where Amanda tries to do its own tricks about spacing out full backups, Bacula simply does then when the schedule declares they should be done, for the most part. The exception to this is that if an incremental or differential job is scheduled, but Bacula cannot find a valid full job in the catalog, it will upgrade the current job to a full. -Are there any issues running the current stable release on FreeBSD 4.11? We do need to upgrade to 6.2 and are doing it slowly, but for the time being we're stuck running 4.11 on the majority of our hosts. Others could speak more authoritatively on this, but for the most part Bacula works flawlessly on FreeBSD. -Amanda calls gtar or dump on the clients. Does bacula use an external program like this or does the client daemon directly access files? I'm The client daemon (file daemon, or FD in Bacula lingo) does its own access. While many people choose to use external programs, such as mysqldump, for certain cases where reading a file directly isn't a good idea, no external programs are required for basic operation of the FD. A corollary to this is that unlike Amanda, Bacula also has its own data format that is used for storing data on volumes, whether they're tape, disk files, or DVD. This format is extremely well documented, and if a full Bacula installation isn't available, there exist simple standalone utilities (bls, bextract, bscan) which you can use to recover the data. also unclear on the differential backup scheme - in amanda I only have full or incremental... Full backup = everything in the fileset Differential backup = everything changed since the last full Incremental = everything changed since the last backup of any level -For now I'll be using the SQLite backend. Is it simple to move to PostgreSQL at a later time? Possible, yes; simple, probably not. SQLite is fine for doing evaluation testing, but I would strongly recommend that when you go production, you just start out with PostgreSQL from the start. You'll save yourself some potential headaches later on. Lastly, anyone here who has already made the switch, I'd love to hear about how that went and what prompted you to switch. The biggest feature for us when we switched many years ago was the ability of Bacula to effectively make use of a tape library, in particular the ability to create a single backup spanning multiple tapes. This limitation was still in Amanda last time I looked, but it's been awhile. As I look through the Amanda wishlist, it's pretty impressive how many items Bacula already has covered ;-) (As a semi-random aside, if someone with more knowledge of Amanda than I wanted to put one together, a feature comparison of Amanda vs Bacula on the wiki could be quite useful) You'll probably here more from me over the next week as I try to get this up and running and taking over our archival backups... We'll be here =) There's also the #bacula channel on IRC as well. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Senior Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC - This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Considering move from Amanda
On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Frank Sweetser wrote: We'll be here =) There's also the #bacula channel on IRC as well. On the FreeNode network: server irc.freenode.net - This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Considering move from Amanda
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello, Charles Sprickman wrote: Lastly, anyone here who has already made the switch, I'd love to hear about how that went and what prompted you to switch. As all the other items have already been answered, I'll just reply to this bit. I moved away from Amanda (several years ago) for three reasons: 1. Amanda just stopped working for me due to its reliance on external programs. I have to backup mostly Win32 machines which Amanda would do through SMB. What I only found out after several months of getting nowhere (I wasn't all too Linux savvy at the time) was that it used smbclient for that and that smbclient had changed its output format (they had added a single blank line and that had broken Amanda's ability to back up my Windows machines). Bacula has a native File Daemon (agent) for Win32 that does a great job at getting the files to the backup server. 2. The ability to append backups to tapes. The office doesn't have much money, so using tapes efficiently by filling them to the brim is a definite plus. Amanda wouldn't append to a tape hence wasting a lot of space on them despite its scheduling. Bacula does this just fine, provided you set up your tape drive correctly (use the btape tests, ...). 3. The ability to span backups over tapes. As the office grew, so did their data and at some point in time, Amanda would simply have trouble fitting jobs to the tapes. Bacula simply spans the job to the next available tape when one is full (again, if the tape drive is set up properly). As for Amanda's 'smart scheduling' of jobs, I never really missed it. I just put the appropriate resources to the task (a nice Quantum Superloader 3 Autochanger that takes care of swapping the tapes as required during the backup jobs) and never looked back. Greetings, Michel -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) iD8DBQFGfE332Vs+MkscAyURAtDrAKDvASrZrIUp57tG/4v+SP5R1vL4JwCg13ox Uh8RbHy7bN653JZxgeqZqno= =J7dO -END PGP SIGNATURE- - This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
