Hi John,
From my point of view "your" issue nº2 is an enhacement. I generally need to restore deleted files by a user like
doc's, cad files or image files.
(as i understand)
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
directory or move a while directory into the backup fileset after a Full
backup, those files will probably not be backed up by an Incremental."
That's concerning to me and seems a huge hole -- files are moved or
renamed all the time in our environment, and we would want them to still
be backed up. Some other places in the manual, it suggests to copy
instead of move/rename directories. But with a user base of several
hundred people, some of which aren't all that computer-savvy, that is
almost impossible. In the Win32 area, it had another warning about the
same problem, with no apparent workaround other than to copy it. Again,
a serious problem. It seems that, as a temporary solution anyway, it
would be easy enough to just treat files inside moved/renamed
directories as new and back them up.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
Thanks for all your work on Bacula and its manual.
-- John Goerzen
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