Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
> After attending yesterday's Bacula talk I am thinking about doing
> offline backups to an eSATA drive.  I'm not sure if Bacula is actually
> the right tool for the job though.

Feeling more OCD than usual last night I decided to get Bacula up and
running.  It took a fair bit of work, actually, to get it to work this
way, but I guess the fact that it is even possible demonstrates that
it is a capable piece of software.

What I don't like about it is the way it deal with "volumes" which are
basically files in the disk world.  It is really designed around tape,
where each volume is a tape and has a fixed total capacity and if you
have 14 tapes there is no sense in overwriting one tape if you have an
unused one to spare.  The problem is that with disk that means that
old backups that don't need to be kept get kept because there are more
free "volumes" left.  In the tape world hanging onto a tape doesn't
really waste space, but in the disk world it does as capacity is
really shared across all the files on a disk.

So, the whole thing is a bit awkward, and I still am a bit concerned
about how much work doing a recovery of the bacula server will be.  If
I were only using it to backup other PCs it would be great, but for
backing up itself the complexity of bacula makes me concerned about
having to basically rebuild the system just to read the backups.

Rich
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug