Backup solution for freeBSD/Symantec Backup exec porting

[Ian Lord]

>Just some thoughts...

>Many others have suggested to avoid tapes; they have some points, but I think they are much too pessimistics. I personally >manage several backup systems, some based on tapes, some on disks, some on a mix of the two. 
>Think twice before moving from tapes to disk; both have their pros and cons.

>I'm using Bacula in at least four different scenarios and I can't agree with you when you deem it as immature. Sure it has some >rough edges (what big program doesn't?), but it never failed me.
>Also I found its documentation far from bad.
>I can't tell you anything about tape library support, though, since I never used a tape library.
>Also, it comes without a GUI; personally I'm fine with CLI, but I agree in this case there are some shortcomings. There are plenty >of web interfaces available, though I'm still waiting to find some time to try them.
>In one case I replaced Backup Exec with Bacula and everyone is much happier that way.

>Just my 2c.

  >bye
>	av.

I know I am going against the trend as everyone is talking about using HD as a backup device, but we are looking as something "my life will depend on". If we were to loose data, we would end up with a multi-million dollars law suit and we'll just go bankrupt.

As we are a SAAS solution, everything is already redundant, we can drop a plane in one of our datacenter and customer won't even notice (technically speaking) as everything is load balanced and replicated live across the sites.

We have very high security with loadbalancers, IDS, DDOS protection, etc.

But let say a hacker would manage to get in and play around, or even an angry employee, or...
A simple "rm -r /" and all of our protection is gone. Our 2 distant copies and the zfs snapshots also...

It's kinda hard for a hacker to format all the tapes in a library furthermore, some tapes will be put in a safe...

I love the idea of using HD, so simple, cheap and fast, but if you need absolute peace of mind, I think a tape backup is much more reliable in this sense in my opinion.

That's why I'm trying to see if bacula could be a good solution in our scenario.

You seem to indicate Bacula is reliable and mature enough to be used in such a "life threatening lol" situation. I'll read more on it and try to figure out if my tape library would work

>From there webpage, the supported autoloaders is really outdated.
http://blog.bacula.org/general/supported-autochangers/

When you are referring to freebsd 4.9 with a 45G Tape, it's hard to be reassured and purchase equipment upfront. If I had that kind of equipment in my lab I would test it out but unfortunately I don't (I'm talking about the LTO6 tape library). I've posted a message on bacula's list to see if someone have a working setup.

Thanks a lot for your message.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ian Lord
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