OSNews

Someone has used Amanda and Bacula and can tell us which is better? I've read about both and Bacula seems more professional, but it's only my feeling. I know Amanda is widely used, but that not means better product.

One thing about Amanda is that it is rock-solid. Sometimes it has worked for me even in face of hardware errors. It doesn't have a pretty GUI (but I don't use GUI's anyway). I have used Bacula a bit, and didn't see a reason to switch to it.

One big advantage that Amanda has over Bacula is that it uses unix native utilities for storage of data (tar and dump). So, even if Amanda engine is not working you can use your age old tools to recover. Bacula uses its own (somewhat strange) format.

This is considered a big enough advantage at our site.

Can Amanda backups Windows volume? It seems critical on my site.

I don't know if this is still the case but in the past Amanda was not able to perform a backup if the data doesn't fit on one tape. Bacula will handle this case and requests more tapes (or uses your autochanger to change the tape).

fs

In my expirience, Bacula is far more mature project. I spent whole month making Amanda work something, untill one guy suggested to try Bacula.

Amanda is ok for simple backups (when I say simple I don't mean backup your home dir), but when you need full hard time working backup (couple of sets of tapes, prexec & postexec scripts, different conditional backups, etc...) it's Bacula. Bacula is even better then some fancy solutions that cost a lot of $$.

Yes, it is a energizer bunny. Good to see some new activity in the project.