Amanda or Bacula

[Pat Lashley]

--On Tuesday, October 14, 2003 10:07:18 -0700 Rick Duvall 
<rduvall at onlinehighways.net> wrote:

> I have about 200 gigs of data to back up every night on multiple machines
> on the network.  All are either FreeBSD or Linux based.  My backup
> machine is FreeBSD.  I have about 30 gigs of dump drive space, and a 20
> gig tape drive. I am pretty much convinced that even if I use
> compression, I will need to span across multiple tapes or get a bigger
> tape drive.  At the very least I may have to get more dump drive and do
> incremental backups.  At any rate, I am having a hard time deciding
> between Amanda and Bacula.  Amanda has been around forever and is known
> to work, but to the best of my knowledge doesn't span across multiple
> tapes.  Bacula, on the other hand, does span across multiple tapes, but
> it hasn't been out as long.

With AMANDA, each filesystem's dump must fit on a single tape; but it
can use multiple tapes in a single dump run.

I've been using AMANDA for several years now; and one of the things
that I like about it is that you tell it how many tapes you have and
how long a dump cycle you want; and it decides when to run full or
incremental dumps for each partition; and the level of increment on
the incrementals.  It is easy to set it up to ensure that there are
at least two full dumps on tape at any given time; even if you have
a very limited number of tapes.

I now have a couple of disks that are too large to fit a full dump
onto a single tape; so I've been looking into other backup systems.
Bacula seems to be the top contender because it appears to be able
to span a single partition's dump across multiple tapes.  But it
uses the classic 'full dump every X, incremental every Y, differential
every Z' scheduling mechanism.  Which means that I'd need to split
my tapes into a set for full dumps and another for incremental or
differential dumps.  And worry about exactly how many tapes I need
in each.  And which set I have loaded into the limited-capacity
auto-changer.  (AMANDA uses the tapes in sequence; so I just swap
the 7-tape carrier for the next one when it complains that it can't
find the one it wants.)


So I'm stuck trying to choose between a system with a real good
scheduling algorythm; but unable to backup large partitions; and
a system that can handle large partitions; but uses a scheduling
scheme that may require me to spend hundreds of dollars for more
tapes...



-Pat