Backup solution for freeBSD/Symantec Backup exec porting

[Olivier Nicole]

Hi,

> We are thinking of purchasing a DELL Powervault LT2000 device which consists of 1 or 2 LTO6 tape drives with 24 slots giving 60TB of data space for retention
>
> I've read a lot on the subject and many people seem to do dumps on a remote HD, etc, but to get to 60TB of disk space would cost a lot and would be less reliable then a tape library in my opinion.

Arguably. Tape library are fare from reliable, they have a lot of
mechanical parts in it that like to fail. And they are very expensive
to buy. Tapes need special care for the storage. While you could
populate your backup machine with new disks when you need it and only
when you need it (and newer disks will have higher capacity too, or
replace older disks with newer bigger ones). Plus using hard disks
gives you a virtually unlimited number of parallel devices compared to
your 2 tape drives.

I have been using a machine with 8 disks for many years, started with
500GB, then 1,5TB and I am finishing the upgrade to 3TB disks. Easy,
transparent, and Amanda.

60TB disks is like USD 2000, how much is the 24 slots, 2 drives library?

> We need something automated and reliable. Hopefully, with a nice gui to restore individual files etc...
>
> We already have backup exec 2014 for our windows servers, but they don't make an agent for freebsd.
> Symantec has netbackup which supports FreeBSD, but it seems really expensive (A rep will call me, tells all about the price lol)
>
> I've read on Bacula and Amanda, and it really doesn't feel like a product mature enough (outdated documentation, no clear indication the tape library would work, etc). Their commercial counterparts are really expensives... I'm afraid to purchase hardware, new server, etc and end up with nothing working.

>From experience, Amanda mailing list is responsive, you could try to
ask there. They have no nice GUI, but it's a strong and reliable
software.

Best regards,

Olivier

>
> In the past, we used backup exec to backup freebsd using their legacy backup agents in linux compat mode and it was working really well. We tried (without extensive effort) to make work their linux agent on freebsd without success.
>
> So my questions are:
>
> 1-      Does anyone have a tape library working with bacula or Amanda ? Does it work well ? (meaning stable, reliable and good performance)
>
> 2-      Would anyone be willing to try to make backup exec work on freebsd using linux compat mode ? I would be willing to finance the project up to 500$ perhaps other people reading this could also contribute to have more man hours on this task.
>
> I love so much FreeBSD Over Linux, but it's always hard to get support from vendors... We are even evaluating to switch our fileservers to Centos (where we also dump sql databases and could replicate important data from freeBSD) to be able to easily back them up using Backup Exec's agent. But this would be my last resort as I don't want to support linux box where everything else in in FreeBSD.
>
> Any help/comment would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
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