Re: [Bacula-users] Noob user impressions and why I chose not to use Bacula
On 12/05/2011 03:39 AM, Jesse Molina wrote: > > Hi > > Recently I was looking for new backup app for my small network. Here's > my story and why I decided that Bacula was not a good choice for me. > > I am not a long time user, so opinions and views may not be shared by > others, but they are true none the less. You can only be a noob once > and I hope this criticism can he constructive and helpful. > > I am not looking for any response from any users. You don't need to > defend Bacula from some noob with a questionable opinion. > > Note that some of my notes below were jotted down in haste during > testing Bacula and some of my comments might be rather harsh or vulgar. > I'm not trying to troll or bash, and I hope these comments can be used > to improve Bacula, and maybe I will get to use it again some day and it > will be a better product. > > I tried to throw all of these notes into a coherent whole, but I'm sure > some of it will come off as being out of order to not making any sense. > > -- [snip..] Thanks Jesse for sharing this testimony. Sometimes like a punch in the mouth, especially a Monday morning with the first coffee. :-) Some important points revealed. To respect your wishes about no answer or comment, I will shut up And this is hard, just prove me how much I like bacula :-) -- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member & Ambassador GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
[Bacula-users] Noob user impressions and why I chose not to use Bacula
Hi Recently I was looking for new backup app for my small network. Here's my story and why I decided that Bacula was not a good choice for me. I am not a long time user, so opinions and views may not be shared by others, but they are true none the less. You can only be a noob once and I hope this criticism can he constructive and helpful. I am not looking for any response from any users. You don't need to defend Bacula from some noob with a questionable opinion. Note that some of my notes below were jotted down in haste during testing Bacula and some of my comments might be rather harsh or vulgar. I'm not trying to troll or bash, and I hope these comments can be used to improve Bacula, and maybe I will get to use it again some day and it will be a better product. I tried to throw all of these notes into a coherent whole, but I'm sure some of it will come off as being out of order to not making any sense. -- I've got two Linux servers, a Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop, and a number of remote hosts. The main host fileset is about 750GB, and all of the other various clients roll into about 600GB. I have a single DLT S4 (800GB native) drive direct attached to a primary server host via Ultra320 bus. I am an experienced sysadmin and I've previously been the primary maintainer of one TSM system and assisted with multiple others. In the end, I just wrote my own scripts using ssh, rsync and tar. It's "good enough". In summary, I could say I was attracted to the idea that Bacula used it's own data archive format and had a database for it's catalog, but was really turned off when I figured out that configuration was not also stored in a database, and how complicated actual restoration was. I find the modular nature of Bacula's components very attractive, as it allows for scaling across multiple hosts for various functions. However, I don't understand the historical need to call the File Daemon anything other than what it is and what everyone seems to want call it: a Client. Rename it to the Client Daemon and get over it. While I appreciate the SQL DB used for historical data (Catalog), I find that primary configuration and some temporary data is scattered across various files. It makes things complicated and difficult. It will always be necessary to have some small configuration to point towards the other daemons and provide passwords, but using config files just makes management difficult. SQL is not hard and Bacula isn't a simple program. I would refer to Nagios vs Icinga as a good example of complicated text config systems gone bad. When you have so much re-usable configuration data and complicated relationships, that's what DBs were made for. Add a separate config DB and then all configuration should be done via bconsole, and a webUI. Configuration could be dumped and loaded via bconsole or maybe an import/export commands alla Juniper/Cisco. As for user interfaces, bconsole is good and I never really bothered with anything else. The one huge complaint I have is that eject and other basic loader controls are absent and should be added. I got really tired of having to umount, ctrl-z, and then call mt just to eject my tape during testing. I realize that this is more complicated for autoloader libs, but allow the user to configure a backend-script for the command and there you go. This can be done. Documentation sucks. It's just not a priority for this project and it shows. Tons of typos, the formatting and layout is horrible, and for the English language I get the impression there are a lot of translation-isms. It was like reading a paper written by five different college students where each one wrote a different portion with a different writing style. In a number of cases, two sentences having the same or very similar meaning will be in the same paragraph. Effectively saying the same thing twice or more. For example: "Bacula can automatically label Volumes if instructed to do so, but this feature is not yet fully implemented. " Really, WTF? If it's not implemented, don't document it. http://www.bacula.org/5.0.x-manuals/en/main/main/Messages_Resource.html For "console = all, !skipped, !saved" in a Messages configuration object, there is no documented explanation for the "saved" message-type. "notsaved" is documented, but "saved" is not. I would call the "Messages Resource" documentation page a readability disaster. I would say the primary problem is lack of appropriate indentation. In some cases, it looks like indentation was intended, but it's not there. PDF-to-HTML disaster? Documentation constantly and annoyingly warns you about nonsense that you don't need to be warned about, provides guidance that does not need to be given, and repeats the same advice multiple times in different contexts for no apparent reason. For example, the documentation on restores says, "Please examine each of the items very care
Re: [Bacula-users] Spooling question
Phil Stracchino schrieb: > I've just acquired an LTO4 drive, and am setting up spooling for the > first time. (The machine with the LTO4 drive attached has mirrored SSDs > and a 6GB/s SAS controller, so it's a great setup for spooling.) > There's one thing I'm not clear on: It appears to me that spooling is > enabled on a job-by-job level, rather than device-by-device. Since my > plan is to have Full backups run to tape while incrementals and > differentials run to disk, what I really want is to be able to have > *all* jobs spooled *if and only if* being written to the tape drive on > babylon5-sd, but not if writing to the 12TB ZFS disk array on babylon4-sd. > > Can this be done? Or is spool enabling strictly job-by-job? you can override it in the job schedule. http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/main/main/Data_Spooling.html --- To override the Job specification in a Schedule Run directive in the Director's conf file. SpoolData = yesno --- Ralf -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Can bacula backup from Windows and Linux?
Simple answer. YES Bacula has clients for windows and source code or binaries for Linux an Linux derived systems. You can either back up to tape or my preferred is to disk. I treat the backup disks as if they were tapes and maintain an on site backup and an off site one. I take the drives in their caddies from the backup server and put them in a flight case to store them over one aeroplane's wing away. ---Guy (via iPhone) On 4 Dec 2011, at 10:01, jonathanb wrote: > Our intern has enough Linux knowledge to do this and he will be assisted by > my colleague who knows a lot about unix systems. I'm trying to make an > assignment which will benefit both of us. He will start by backing the > clients and if all goes well we will take a look if Bacula can make backups > to tapes for the servers. > > Thank you for your help! > --- > Jonathanb > > +-- > |This was sent by nathan.burgerh...@gmail.com via Backup Central. > |Forward SPAM to ab...@backupcentral.com. > +-- > > > > -- > All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure > contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, > security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this > data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d > ___ > Bacula-users mailing list > Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
[Bacula-users] Can bacula backup from Windows and Linux?
Our intern has enough Linux knowledge to do this and he will be assisted by my colleague who knows a lot about unix systems. I'm trying to make an assignment which will benefit both of us. He will start by backing the clients and if all goes well we will take a look if Bacula can make backups to tapes for the servers. Thank you for your help! --- Jonathanb +-- |This was sent by nathan.burgerh...@gmail.com via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to ab...@backupcentral.com. +-- -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] 5.2.2 patch submitted to FreeBSD
Thank you, Dan! --- Silver On Sat, 3 Dec 2011 18:15:46 -0500, Dan Langille wrote: > The patch for Bacula 5.2.2 has been submitted to the FreeBSD ports > system. I expect you'll be able to upgrade early this coming week. > > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/163034 > > That will upgrade these ports: > > sysutils/bacula-server > sysutils/bacula-client > > sysutils/bacula-docs will be upgraded by > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/163044 > > sysutils/bacula-bat will take more work. I'd be happy if someone > supplied a PR to the FreeBSD tree for that. :) > > -- > Dan Langille - http://langille.org -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
