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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
Don't know about these so I can't comment on it.
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.
That is correct. This feature is being worked on but for now, Bacula
restores ALL files, including deleted and renamed ones.
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?
No. AMANDA's concept is particular in that aspect, Bacula behaves more
like traditional Backup software: It backs up according to its schedule
or fulls and incrementals, spanning backups accross multiple tapes and
requesting them as required, ...). You can manually stagger Full backups
to optimize Backup times and reduce tape changes (I've done so in my
location) but it won't do it for you and it will certainly not try to
actively avoid a tape mount. It does however operate with any
autochanger (a.k.a. tape library a.k.a. tape robot) that works with mtx
and can thus automatically mount tapes, provided they're inside the
autochanger.
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?
As far as I know, Bacula will continue to spool to disk, but the backup
will not end until everything has been flushed to tape (and the catalog).
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?
I think you can instruct Bacula to use tapes only once (or mark tapes as
full after every backup through scripting) but that's not used very
often (c.f. 3).
6) And even more generally, are people actually using Bacula in medium
to large organizations? Reading about how the author's test network is
using token ring, 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. Is that
an incorrect assumption?
That is an incorrect assumption. I've read testimonials of people
backing up multiple TBs with Bacula on the list here. Of course, most
large organizations will rather pay for commercial software (read Data
Protector, Netbackup or TSM) than try open source software, but in
theory, Bacula should work for them too. Just a few examples:
User with 6TB full backup:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bacula.user/13313/match=terabytes
User with a Qualstar 5466 SAIT-1 library:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bacula.user/14145/match=terabytes
Hope that helps...
Greetings,
Michel
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