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
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