Bacula vs. Amanda vs. whatever ...

[Luke Dean]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Kiffin Gish wrote:

> I have a home network with two FreeBSD servers (web- and file-server), a 
> number of Windows desktops and a wireless FreeBSD laptop all connected 
> to one another using Samba.
>
> What is the best tool to create automatic central backups? For now I 
> just want to make backups on disk but later using an external tape 
> drive.
>
> Some swear by Amanda, others insist Bacula works best with Samba, just 
> curious is all.

Amanda is the one that works with Samba.  Bacula has its own client/server 
software.

I have a similar home network.  I used Bacula for over a year.  I used the 
SQLite database for the catalog and backed up to a Raid array.  I chose 
bacula because it allows me to have a single backup solution for both 
Windows and BSD machines, and the only thing I need to set up for 
communication is TCP/IP.

I had some serious deadlocking problems with bacula recently, and was led 
to believe that those problems were corrected in the version that's 
currently in the ports collection.  However I'm now having hardware 
problems (why did I buy a $20 RAID controller?) and am unable to make 
backups of any kind.  I will probably give bacula another try after I fix 
my hardware problems.

I have never tried Amanda.

These are the only two solutions I know of for making automated backups of 
both Windows and BSD machines.

I've read that bacula can make a backup that's complete enough to do a 
bare metal recovery on BSD.  Thankfully I've never had the opportunity to 
test that myself.  I don't believe either bacula or amanda can make a 
complete enough backup to do a bare metal recovery of a Windows machine 
because Windows locks so many critical system files while it's in 
operation.  I wonder if a combination of Microsoft's backup utilities and 
Samba might accomplish this.  There are several simple and good backup 
solutions for FreeBSD.  It's those darn Windows machines that are so hard 
to back up.