Nathan wrote:
We are running backup softwares for incrementals/differentials and full backups with variouse softwares currently using dirvish scripts + amanda .. what is everyones views on other opensourced backup software? is there anything better or other options we have missed? We are looking at backula as an option? any thoughts?
I wanted to recommend you to take a look at Bacula, than I saw it is already on your list. Bacula is very nice peace of software. It can do almost everything that very expensive products from Veritas and Legato do. The only thing it is missing is a nice GUI. You'll need to configure it using your favorite text editor. It can be a bit complex to configure, however it does come with good default configuration files that you can use to build on. However, you should read documentation and really understand how Bacula works before deploying. It is much more powerful and therefore also much more complex system than Amanda.
It is based on three separate components. The center piece is Director. This is basically backup server. Other two pieces are Storage Daemon that handles the storage (you can have as many as you like, it can run on same machine as Director, or on dedicated machine, or even on the client) and File Daemon (this is basically the client).
The storage format isn't standard (so you can't simply take the tapes and run tar or restore commands on them, like you could with Amanda). It also needs SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite are supported at the moment). There's couple of utilities distributed with Bacula that allow you to read and extract data directly from tapes (in case you loose your backup server or SQL database), and/or recreate SQL database from content of the tapes.
Bacula also has some nice security features. You can use SSL to encrypt communication between all three components (Director, Storage Daemon and File Daemon), so you don't have to worry of somebody sniffing your /etc/shadow while your network backup runs.
It also supports encryption of the backup on the client machine. That means that the data is encrypted. So even if somebody steals your tapes, he can't do anything with them. He would need decryption key, which is normally stored on the client machine (this allows you to centrally backup several departments or clients that don't trust each other, or you). Also, think offsite tapes stored in "trusted" location somewhere far away.
There are some very interesting features planned for the future.All in all, very interesting project. Something worth including into repository such as centosplus or Dag's.
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