Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions

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

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 10:08 PM, Andrew Libby <alibby@xforty.com> wrote:
> I've been using BackupPC for probably 5-6 years and it does
> okay.  We don't have a super big setup, rather a number of
> small setups (dozen systems, few TB of storage).
>

I've actually used that in the past.  It does dedup which is useful
when you're backing up a decent number of systems.

> We've used it on external USB drives (though ones we
> don't remove), as well as on dedicated backup systems
> on both Linux and Nexenta.

That's the problem with backuppc - it can't operate if some of the
data is offline.  For security I'd prefer to not leave my full backups
online just to run a daily incremental.  I believe dar also suffers
this limitation.  The strength of bacula is the index - it knows what
is on the full backup even if it isn't readable at the moment.  The
downside of bacula is also the index - it is a complex solution which
has me concerned.

If I just did an rsync-based backup I could restore directly from a
rescue CD with little fuss in the event of a disaster.  Rsync is just
not great if you want to go back in time, or if you want to compress
your backups (I'd really prefer to be able to do that).

I plan to mess around on a VM and see how easily I can bootstrap a
system that can run bacula and do a restore job.

I think the better model for bacula is to run it on a dedicated server
so that if it actually dies it can just be rebuilt.  Rebuilding bacula
on bare metal just seems like a significant project.

Rich
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