Re: [PLUG] Backup packages

["Austin Murphy" <austin.murphy@gmail.com>]

On 9/9/07, Paul L. Snyder <plsnyder@drexel.edu> wrote:
> I'm finally getting around to setting up a backup system for all the
> various machines around my house.  Any recommendations as to a good
> package to use?
...
> Bacula looks like it has a lot of moving parts.  Has anybody played
> with rdiff-backup?

I use rdiff-backup on a handful of machines at work.  It seems to be
substantially slower than rsync but that really doesn't matter that
much in my case.   The part I like better than vanilla rsync is the
history of reverse incrementals.  If there is a specific file you need
to restore, you can easily find and restore it just by browsing the
mirror and the increments directory and copying it.

I have it configured for pull style backups.  (My backup server makes
an SSH connection to the system getting backed up to initiate the
session.)  Laptops may work better with a push style. The only problem
I see with a push style config is the contention for the same disk(s)
when multiple systems are trying to backup at the same time.

Bacula seems to be following the design philosophy of NetBackup.  I
think the point is to allow massive parallelization so you can backup
as many systems as possible in the minimum amount of time.  Backing up
hundreds of systems using multiple backup servers, each with multiple
tape drives is a relatively hard problem.

Austin
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