[lug] Bacula

[David L. Anselmi]

Dan Ferris wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with Bacula?

I've been using it for a few months to back up a home machine.

Install was really simple (with aptitude).  I didn't use MySQL but I'd 
guess that wouldn't be much harder on Debian.

Learning enough to make the configs the way I wanted took most of a day. 
  I knew what I was after but Bacula had an odd way of looking at it 
(compared to the Veritas I used to use).  There was also a bias to tape 
backups and I was using a disk.

Otherwise, no complaints.  I was able to get it to do what made sense to 
me.  And I like the way I can set up one job and then make it full, 
incremental, or differential at run time (my jobs run by hand since the 
box isn't up all the time).

I use the command line regularly since I do my backups by hand.  But for 
automatic jobs that probably isn't very necessary--the jobs are 
configured and scheduled in the config files.  So you can see and 
control what's happening with the command line but you don't have to set 
up the whole thing that way.

While this is probably overkill for my use, it's nice to have experience 
with something that will scale to a larger system.  I'll proabably 
replace some home grown scripts on another network with bacula eventually.

I've also used hdup which is easier to learn but considerably less 
flexible.  It's fine for a single machine but doesn't seem to scale up 
very well.

Dave