Amanda Backup Suite
October 16, 2008
I’ve been contemplating how I’m going to handle backups once my current office goes dark. I’ll be moved to NJ at that point, and in the NJ office. The tape changer and backup server will have to be located there, along with a decent amount of disk storage. The hard part is always the logistics.
My current backup scheme is not ideal, at least in the way that it accomplishes the backups. The scripts sometimes fail, in many cases have been coded in haste, and are, in a word, kludgy.
By happenstance, Locutus at the IT Toolbox wrote today about Amanda, a commandline based full featured backup solution capable of being configured to do wonderful things.
Anyone have experience with this, or have another backup solution they know and love?
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October 16th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I’d recommend checking out Bacula. I currently use it and it works wonders once you get the hang of it. It has the capability to backup to disk along with backing up to tape.
http://www.bacula.org/
October 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
@anonymous
I’ve heard of bacula but never tried it.
Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out!
October 16th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
We are running Bakbone’s NetVault. It’s not open source or free, but it does its job very well.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I also thought of having a look at Bacula. I just didn’t think it would be scalable enough for me. It does look like a good program though.
Thanks for linking to my blog too.
October 16th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
You can try BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html). Perl based, uses rsync, tar, ssh and similar common tools. It also have a nice web interface, useful to give users the chance of getting their backup files by their own.
October 16th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I ran Amanda for a long time, probably 5 years or so. I loved it.
It’s ability to manage bandwidth and disk pools are something that our current commercial software still can’t beat.
I quit using it only because it was not actively maintained for a while. About that time we bought into Legato, so I switched.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I used Amanda from around 1996 to 2000. I stopped using it because it wasn’t mature enough for some of the enterprise things we were doing. I moved on to Veritas Backup Exec, then Syncsort Backup Express (who?) at another company, and now Veritas NetBackup. There is nothing like the peace of mind that NetBackup gives us – it is money well spent.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
@Ernest
That’s a really interesting software suite. I think the per-machine license is too much for us, but I’m on hold in the sales queue to ask about the volume fees. Thanks a lot for turning me on to that. I even saw here where our standard install (CentOS) is supported as a client. Excellent!
October 17th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I second for the Bacula suggestion, but don’t be impressed by the learning curve, it pays later :)
I’ve used Bacula to backup 70+ servers, on disk and on tape (2 autoloaders), I swear it scales well ;) Database tuning knowledge is necessary when catalog turns big (dependant on the number of files backed up).
You can find plenty of help on the bacula-users mailing-list (quite active ml, 10-30 messages/day) and if you want professionnal support, Kern Sibbald (lead developer) has just founded “Bacula Systems” to offer this kind of service. Bacula development will go on the open-source way, no dual-licensing, no restrictions.
http://www.baculasystems.com/
October 17th, 2008 at 5:49 am
I’d recommend checking out rsnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/
Simple but effective data retention configuration and uses the rsync we all know and love. Works as advertised for me.
October 17th, 2008 at 9:39 am
@seb
It sure seems like Bacula is winning the voting war. It sounds like it worked for your relatively complex network, so I’m sure it would work on mine as well. Were your 70+ servers at one site, or spread across a WAN?
@nickyp
Ah, yet another backup solution I hadn’t heard of before. I like the fact that it uses rsync, since that’s about the most solid part of the existing backup solution! Thanks for the link, I’ll be checking it out. Simple is frequently better than complex.
October 17th, 2008 at 10:08 am
It was on a couple of datacenters well interconnected.
Bacula works well with WAN links, you can achieve slightly better reliability by tunneling it (OpenVPN for instance)
October 17th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I think rSnapshot is an implementation of Mike Rubel's system. There are many others; Dirvish springs to mind.
Here's a link to Mike's paper that threw all previous backup & disaster recovery systems out the window:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
If you use the hard link trick (rsync –link-dest) and rsync batch mode (to sync up an offsite copy for disaster recovery) you can outperform any commercial product by a bazillion orders of magnitude with a few simple shell scripts.
I wrote an enterprise backup system that provides unnattended self-restore capabilities for end users (via samba) and off-site storage (rsync batch) on cheap highly available hardware (CoRaid AOE) in less than 300 lines of bash. It's been running for around seven years, I think, (although the coraids were only added in the last 3 years to replace underperforming Dell SAN tackle) with zero maintenance and no system administration other than routine security patching. It does daily backup of around 40 linux and HP-UX servers to a 1.2 terabyte coraid and keeps about 30 days live storage – the hard link trick gives the equivalent of transparent 90% data compression in our environment.
Read Mike's paper, adapt the ideas to your site(s).
–Charlie
PS: blogger's captcha system does not work with W3C compliant browsers running in any sort of secure mode. You aren't going to get many comments from folks that run Firefox with noscript, which rules out the most knowledgeable commentators. Just sayin'.
–C
October 17th, 2008 at 11:29 am
@Charlie
Thanks for the link to the paper. I’ve heard of the hard link trick before. I’m not opposed to it, but rolling my own solution really leaves a bad taste in my mouth right now. I’m time crunched as it is.
As such, I can see myself deploying a hybrid solution where the backup server uses rsnapshot for incrementals, with some other solution to get the files to there. I’ll just have to read more about it and its usage to really get a grip on how it will work for me.
The hard link thing works great (I’ve done it for maintaining a readily available directory that contains the last 30 days of data), so rSnaphot sounds promising. Like I said before, I’ll be sure to write about what I decide on.
Thanks also for the notice of the captcah. It’s been fixed.
December 5th, 2008 at 12:57 am
As far as I know , UNLIKE amanda, bacula image can only restored by bacula programm.
with amanda, you can restore without installing amanda, use dd command ..
April 7th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Amanda users can deploy encryption using a dedicated PCI board from Indra Networks. Best thing about this is, it has very simple and secure key management. visit http://indranetworks.com/SSamanda.html to know more