Amanda developers released Amanda 2.6.0 today. This is a significant update to Amanda backup software with improvements in ease of installation and configuration, security, scalability and robustness. Amanda 2.6.0 is available for download (in both source and binary-package form) here. Update: Other interesting open source releases today: Inkscape 0.46, AbiWord 2.6.0 and Ardour 2.4.0.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
I can't comment on Amanda, but bacula is amazing. It has a nice "dumb" client and all the important client configuration is on the director. I have it installed on 14 windows machines, 6 osX, 2 linux, 2 freebsd. Bacula can be a little confusing with its three parts, the file daemon (client), storage daemon (talks to the tape when client connects), and the director (tells client what to send to the storage and when). Once it is set up, it pretty much does its thing and I just check we web interface (separate) to see if there are any problems. Getting everything to work with the autochanger took a while, but well worth it now.
You may also want to look into just using rsync. I use it in a few labs I support where they just need a copy of large sets of data somewhere in case disaster occurs. It depends on what you need. Having something like bacula keep daily changes to files over months is nice, but uses a lot of space on the tapes. Everything is configurable though.
Amanda would probably also fit in somewhere, it just depends on what you need.
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:2005-12-02
I tried both native dump/scp copying and amanda. Amanda worked very well and it's very easy to install and setup.
Not sure about rsync, but I always had performance problems with very large files... seems that the software doesn't scale very well.
Of course I'm talking about two/three years ago, maybe things have changed nowadays.
Member since:2005-07-06
I had to look into backup solutions some time ago, and Amanda and Bacula were the two I got down to. While Amanda has been around for some time, is very mature and has improved greatly recently, if it's a network backup system with all the 'enterprisey' features you think you need then Bacula is pretty incredible. You can take all manner of expensive backup software such as Netbackup, drop it in the bin and replace it with Bacula. It even has a nice GUI now. In later versions (> 1.38) it now lets you mount a partition before backup and unmount it afterwards for safety.
Bacula has clients for Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS and anything it will compile on, the Windows client uses Volume Shadow Copy and it's possible to backup and restore ACLs on any platform and have any tape, disk or backup medium arrangement you can think of. We use it in conjunction with LVM snapshots to make downtime as long as it takes to create a read-only snapshot.
I have three of these Linkstation devices at different locations:
http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/FreeLink_for_the_Linkstati...
They are all modified to run a full Debian Freelink distribution as described in that article, all with Bacula installed and all backing up to internal and external hard drives, as well as off-site. Many people still use tape quite happily (we don't for cost and manpower reasons mainly), but it is a very good idea to have some form of disk based backup as well. It's not as if tapes are indestructible.
Enterprise backup without the cost. Priceless.
Edited 2008-04-02 15:10 UTC
Member since:2007-09-06
I'm looking at Bacula, Restore and (now) Amanda. I'd love to find something that works like the WHS backup; client on local workstation for backups and a boot disk for restores all from the demean on the storage server.
Anyone have other backup program recommendations outsid ehte big three named so far?
Member since:
2005-08-31
At this moment I'm still using cron scripts runnnig dump/restore and tar over ssh. :-) So I'm looking for a decent network backup solution. All systems involved are UNIX (BSD). Does anyone have experience with Amanda vs Bacula (and maybe other systems), what are the pro's and con's of each?