On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 12:11:10PM +0000, Alan Brown wrote: > >That is correct. This feature is being worked on but for now, Bacula > >restores ALL files, including deleted and renamed ones. > > Most backup software works this way.
Then most backup software is broken. Perhaps Bacula can be better. > >>3) We perform backups overnight, when no operators are here, so as to > >>minimize performance impact on our users. We have enough data that it > >>is not possible to fit a full backup of every filesystem onto a single > >>tape. > > Can't you afford an autochanger? Well, it hasn't been necessary since Amanda can schedule everything nicely for us. It's beginning to sound like if we want to use Bacula, we'd have to do a full backup every night. I'll have to look into it some more, I suppose. > By far the biggest set of postings on this list revolves around fileset > definition questions, which is understandable given the complexity of the > questions. In larger backup sets the issues become less complex as it > tends to simply become "backup everything" I guess I haven't tried it yet, but this sort of thing seems very well documented. > Quite simply: In a professional environment, if your full overnight > backups do not fit on a single tape then you either need an adequately > sized changer or larger tapes. Simple economic calculations will show that > staff costs will easily exceed that of adequate hardware in short order > when intervention is continuously required. Now in your environment, though, you were not worrying about offsite backups and also were using a single tape for a whole week. I'm a little confused about what you're suggesting here. At our site, our policy has been to, each morning, take the most recent backup tapes offsite. Offsite means a waterproof, fireproof safe deposit box in a bank's vault. That way, if disaster should strike, our most recent backup would be available offsite. This obviously wouldn't work with appending to a tape every day, and as you said, the cost of media is negligible compared to the cost of operator overhead or disaster recovery for any midsize or larger organization. So I don't think we need to worry too much about conserving tape cartridges throughout the week. > several USB external disk drives, in order to be able to keep at least one > full backup offsite (and will likely go that way when the DAT drive > finally dies) Interesting you should mention that. I recently bought two 400GB USB2/Firewire drives for backing up my home network. I use rdiff-backup (http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org) to back that up. When backing up to disk instead of tape, I much prefer rdiff-backup to using a traditional tape backup software, since binary deltas let me backup more and store it longer. > Bacula itself is very much set-and-forget for most people and a setup > which requires continual operator intervention is likely poorly thought > out in the first place. That's good to hear. -- John ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
