Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions

["Lee H. Marzke" <lee@marzke.net>]

Bacula is perhaps good at very large environments of physical
servers,  but the overhead is quite substantial.

>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.

The SQL database is also backed up in bacula,  but you
need bacula running to recover this.  Yes that would take many
hours of practice to make sure you can actually recover from a
major failure. 

Yes keeping and rotating virtual tapes takes quite a lot of work until
everything is just right.  I spend 10 min every morning fixing
Bacula jobs in an environment with 35 servers. ( Mostly Windows)

If you virtualize with VMware at least, then everything is 10+ times easier
The VM's are snapshot,  and then captured and de-duped.  I was
a big fan of Bacula until I virtualized everything and then
the backup jobs just 'worked'.

Also the de-dup options of virtual backup solutions consume about
1/10 the disk space for backup. ( but it needs to be faster disk)




Lee






----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rich Freeman" <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 2:50:23 PM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions
> 
> 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
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 


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