Amanda developers released Amanda 2.6.0 today. This is a significant update to Amanda backup software with improvements in ease of installation and configuration, security, scalability and robustness. Amanda 2.6.0 is available for download (in both source and binary-package form) here. Update: Other interesting open source releases today: Inkscape 0.46, AbiWord 2.6.0 and Ardour 2.4.0.
Amanda 2.6.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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Hi,
It’s Abiword 2.6, not 2.4.
Étienne.
At this moment I’m still using cron scripts runnnig dump/restore and tar over ssh. 🙂 So I’m looking for a decent network backup solution. All systems involved are UNIX (BSD). Does anyone have experience with Amanda vs Bacula (and maybe other systems), what are the pro’s and con’s of each?
I can’t comment on Amanda, but bacula is amazing. It has a nice “dumb” client and all the important client configuration is on the director. I have it installed on 14 windows machines, 6 osX, 2 linux, 2 freebsd. Bacula can be a little confusing with its three parts, the file daemon (client), storage daemon (talks to the tape when client connects), and the director (tells client what to send to the storage and when). Once it is set up, it pretty much does its thing and I just check we web interface (separate) to see if there are any problems. Getting everything to work with the autochanger took a while, but well worth it now.
You may also want to look into just using rsync. I use it in a few labs I support where they just need a copy of large sets of data somewhere in case disaster occurs. It depends on what you need. Having something like bacula keep daily changes to files over months is nice, but uses a lot of space on the tapes. Everything is configurable though.
Amanda would probably also fit in somewhere, it just depends on what you need.
tape?! does it also support storage which arent crappy and antiquated?
Yes it also supports disk. Tape is still widely used. It would be a waste to have spindles used for archival data. A 12TB SAN is going to cost maybe 30k+ and is expensive to expand, while 12TB of 800GB LTO-3 (not sure about LTO-4) tapes and a autochanger/library may only cost around 7k.
It depends on how you are using the information. For archiving or long term retention, tape is the best way to go. A 800GB LTO-3 tape is only $39.99.
When my 16tape autochanger is getting full, I can just get some more tapes. It may not be as convenient to have all you data at a moments notice, but for some things, you don’t really need that. Any large business that has large amounts of data that needs to be backed up/archived/retained is going to have a tape silo or something similar. The price is just too good.
welcome to the enterprise world mate.
Tapes aren’t crappy and antiquated. A single LTO4 tape can hold 800GB of data. About 1.5TB with compression.
I wouldn’t exactly call tape antiquated. Its an old technology, yes, but still much cheaper than DVD or hard disk backups in most cases. You can get a 400/800 (compressed) gig LTO3 tape for about $40 these days, with an estimated life expectancy much greater than that of standard hard drives (30 years for most tape providers). LTO4 tapes go even higher. Combine that with a drive changer that can handle 30 or 60 tapes and you generally have enough backup storage to last a long while.
When you are doing enterprise backup work, there’s nothing better than tape.
And on the other side of the coin, bacula supports using HDD and DVD volumes just like tape. I used disk volumes on a 5 TB SAN array for a while, until I moved back to tape because, frankly, tape was faster and more reliable for our needs. I’m currently backing-up over 100 individual systems and 2TB a month on a 30-slot fiber channel LTO3 changer with bacula.
”
tape?! does it also support storage which arent crappy and antiquated?
”
In short; yes.
But; maybe you have something else that can hold a terabyte backup? I’m all ears because I haven’t found something outside of tape that can hold a 250 gig drive let alone a TB. Sure, RAID5 does a nice job of your “hot backup” storage server but what do you do for the cold backups kept off site.
I dont support uninformed morons who think tape is crappy and antiquated.
I tried both native dump/scp copying and amanda. Amanda worked very well and it’s very easy to install and setup.
Not sure about rsync, but I always had performance problems with very large files… seems that the software doesn’t scale very well.
Of course I’m talking about two/three years ago, maybe things have changed nowadays.
I had to look into backup solutions some time ago, and Amanda and Bacula were the two I got down to. While Amanda has been around for some time, is very mature and has improved greatly recently, if it’s a network backup system with all the ‘enterprisey’ features you think you need then Bacula is pretty incredible. You can take all manner of expensive backup software such as Netbackup, drop it in the bin and replace it with Bacula. It even has a nice GUI now. In later versions (> 1.38) it now lets you mount a partition before backup and unmount it afterwards for safety.
Bacula has clients for Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS and anything it will compile on, the Windows client uses Volume Shadow Copy and it’s possible to backup and restore ACLs on any platform and have any tape, disk or backup medium arrangement you can think of. We use it in conjunction with LVM snapshots to make downtime as long as it takes to create a read-only snapshot.
I have three of these Linkstation devices at different locations:
http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/FreeLink_for_the_Linkstati…
They are all modified to run a full Debian Freelink distribution as described in that article, all with Bacula installed and all backing up to internal and external hard drives, as well as off-site. Many people still use tape quite happily (we don’t for cost and manpower reasons mainly), but it is a very good idea to have some form of disk based backup as well. It’s not as if tapes are indestructible.
Enterprise backup without the cost. Priceless.
Edited 2008-04-02 15:10 UTC
I’m looking at Bacula, Restore and (now) Amanda. I’d love to find something that works like the WHS backup; client on local workstation for backups and a boot disk for restores all from the demean on the storage server.
Anyone have other backup program recommendations outsid ehte big three named so far?
Will they build it for OSX/Intel this time?
Recent versions haven’t been built for OSX at all and the most recent official build I could find was PPC only and hence very slow.
There is an unofficial Intel build by Pu7o, but it is v2.4.4 only and does not include the extra plugins etc.
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=15322&st=0