[afnog] Good backup software

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 09:56:03AM +0100, Phil Regnauld wrote:
> 	Joke apart, Amanda works fine but has -- still today -- severe
> 	limitations, such as volumes that cannot span several tapes.

Did anybody mention dump -L yet?

Looking at the Bacula docs: it looks like it can't rebuild a server unless
you've taken special care to record some information by hand first. In fact
you are supposed to burn a separate recovery CD-ROM for every machine you're
backing up.
http://www.bacula.org/rel-manual/Disast_Recove_Using_Bacula.html#SECTION000407000000000000000

Furthermore, it can't rebuild a Windows box at all without some third-party
software, or doing raw partition backups while the server is down.
http://www.bacula.org/rel-manual/Disast_Recove_Using_Bacula.html#SECTION0004018000000000000000

So beware of this, and make sure you test recovery of a system completely,
onto a fresh machine. The fact that Bacula says it successfully backed up a
machine does not by itself mean that you could rebuild it if it fails.

I'd like to see backup software which records _all_ the information
necessary to rebuild or clone a machine itself, so there's nothing you can
forget. Once the machine has died, it's too late :-(

I'd also like to see software which records crypto hashes of all files and
uses them to avoid duplicates - so when you're backing up 100 machines with
the same O/S, you don't get 100 copies of every file in the operating
system...

Regards,

Brian.