Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions

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

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
> 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.

As I shared last night at North, I decided to abandon Bacula as the
right solution for my linux server.  I'm using rsync for mythtv video
(I don't need retention, and it won't compress anyway), and sarab/dar
for everything else (I think - I need to see how that performs for a
few days).  That makes restoration very simple - I'm sure I'll do a
test of some sort just the same but I really don't expect there to be
issues with getting dar working on a liveCD.

I'm still on the fence about using Bacula for other hosts on the
network, vs backuppc or something else.  For those hosts offline
storage is less of a concern - much less data is backed up
automatically.  One issue I'm running into with Bacula is that you
can't set a schedule to have a preferred time but to still run daily
if it gets missed (as far as I can tell).  So if I want to back up a
desktop and the desktop is powered off, the daily backup just gets
missed entirely.  I'm not sure if backuppc handles this situation
better.

One thing I do like about Bacula is that it uses volume shadow copy,
which means that it can back up the registry hives.  I don't know if
BackupPC supports this.  (I doubt it if it is just running in smb mode
- not sure if rsync supports this with the local daemon.)

Any thoughts here?  Can Bacula be made to be persistent in getting a
daily job done if it fails at the planned time?  Can BackupPC do this,
and does it successfully backup in-use registries?

Rich
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