Bacula requires an operator as opposed to a more simple system like Lone-tar
where you just have a secretary stick in the next tape and the backup runs.
The handling and labeling of tapes is critical with bacula since backups can be
spread all over the place and bacula wants to manage the tape pool so the
operator has to pay attention to bacula's instructions.
On the other hand, it does a nicer job of backing up machines over the network
and controlling remote backups.
Recovery of the system holding the bacula catalog is a bit of an issue and if
you do not have a good manual control of your tapes, you will spend a long time
getting your system back up.
Something like Lone-tar just has you stick a recovery CD in the drive, your
latest full backup in the tape drive and boot. Then you apply your incrementals
and you are back up.
Disks are very convenient but a bit expensive for archival storage. A 72 GB DAT
tape is about $20. A hard drive is a bit more.
You have to think about the the threats that you are protecting against.
1) Theft of the servers - If they steal your backup disk with this, then what?
2) Destruction of the building - fire, etc. If you lose the entire data center,
it would be nice to have some off-site media.
3) Loss of a drive. Drives are one day closer of failing every day. What if it
is your catalog database?
4) Loss of a user file. All strategies work pretty well.
There are lots of other situations but these are the biggies. If you have
figured out how to get by 1, 2 and 3 probably any other circumstance will be a
piece of cake.
Watch out for database backups since they do not like the fact that you started
backing up the database at one time and then later came for the log. It may not
be very happy when it is restored like that since the log and the data are not
in sync. Bacula stores its catalog in your MySQL database so it is active while
the backup is running.
Experience is a great but expensive teacher. One of my clients was robbed and
lost the server with the last backup tape in the tape drive. It took 2 days to
replace the hardware and get everything back up but it is a lesson that you do
not forget. I had a good backup system and off-site media from the preceeding
day (always take the latest backup off-site as soon as it is done.)
I recently lost the drive on the servers and it took way too long to get back
up and running with bacula. Just reconstructing the catalog took several days.
It takes about 3 hours to scan a backup tape to rebuild the catalog. If you do
not have a manual system to control your tapes, you can spend a long time just
getting the catalog rebuilt to a point of usability.
I hope that these ideas help. Your backup system consists of both automated and
manual procedures and you have to implement both of them to have an adequate
response to a disaster.
Ron
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Alex Polvi
Sent: August 22, 2005 7:18 PM
To: bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Bacula-users] Other testimonials?
Greetings,
We are looking at moving our backups over to bacula. I checked out the
testimonials on the main website, but those did not seem comparable to
our environment. Does anyone have experience using bacula with 100+
clients (mainly Linux, but also a sprinkle of Mac OSX and Windows Server)?
Has it been proven to be able to complete daily backups with that many
hosts using disk or tapes?
Also, we are leaning toward using spinning disks instead of tapes. We
have systems at a few different co-locations and do not have the man
power to administer tape-driven backups across our entire infrastructure.
Are there any advantages of bacula and tapes that might make us reconsider?
Thanks for your insight.
Regards,
-Alex
--
Alex Polvi :: polvi at mozilla com :: sysadmin
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