Linked by Chander Kant on Tue 29th Nov 2005 08:51 UTC
General Development This was a mixed Thanksgiving weekend for open source communities. We had a renewed PR onslaught from proprietary software vendors ("Linux is anti-commercial") and even hardball politics. But there were lot of interesting announcements made: Firefox 1.5, codenamed "Deer Park" will finally be unwrapped on November 29th (I have been using the beta, and I love it). Among all this activity and with little fan-fare, the Amanda project launched its new Wiki and Forums.
Thread beginning with comment 66308
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Amanda vs Bacula
by on Tue 29th Nov 2005 09:57 UTC in reply to "Amanda is cool"

Member since:

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.

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE: Amanda vs Bacula
by jamescgarcia on Tue 29th Nov 2005 10:01 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula"
jamescgarcia Member since:
2005-11-29

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.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE: Amanda vs Bacula
by linuxchix2 on Tue 29th Nov 2005 11:04 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula"
linuxchix2 Member since:
2005-11-29

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.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: Amanda vs Bacula
by on Wed 30th Nov 2005 07:37 in reply to "RE: Amanda vs Bacula"
Member since:

But Bacula's founder, Kern Sibbald, is committed to format stability. The format is documented and therefore I think you can read your old taped even in 10,20 years (if your hardware is in place, that is).

There are statically linked restore tools and even a rescue disk so you can do a bare-metal restore.

fs

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE[2]: Amanda vs Bacula
by on Tue 29th Nov 2005 16:16 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula"
Member since:

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

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE[3]: Amanda vs Bacula
by linuxchix2 on Tue 29th Nov 2005 16:53 in reply to "RE[2]: Amanda vs Bacula"
linuxchix2 Member since:
2005-11-29

Yes Amanda can backup Windows. It uses samba to access the windows volumes to be backed up.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE: Amanda vs Bacula
by on Wed 30th Nov 2005 07:41 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula"
Member since:

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

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE[2]: Amanda vs Bacula
by on Wed 30th Nov 2005 09:36 in reply to "RE: Amanda vs Bacula"
Member since:

Amanda 2.5 has tape spanning feature to go beyond one tape.

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE: Amanda vs Bacula
by on Fri 2nd Dec 2005 16:16 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula"
Member since:

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 $$.

Reply Parent Score: 0