3 ms·

Since I see various different backup utilities on here from time to time, I'm curious if anybody uses Bacula (or Bareos)? It does encryption, deduplication, sc

by gh02t 12y ago

Since I see various different backup utilities on here from time to time, I'm curious if anybody uses Bacula (or Bareos)? It does encryption, deduplication, scheduling, pruning etc. I use it at home and run the director and storage daemons in a jail on my FreeBSD NAS, which coordinates all of my computers together for backup regularly. I then back up the encrypted backups to Crashplan. I tried other stuff (especially duplicity), but they just didn't work very well for me. Restoring encrypted backups with duplicity was especially slow and annoying and even using the duply frontend it was rather fickle. Bacula has some disadvantages though... for one it is a bit complicated to get working. It's partitioned into multiple daemons, each of which handles a different task and which can be on different machines. This makes it flexible, but also makes the configuration more complicated. It also works best if you have a central backup server that can run the director and storage daemons 24/7. You can set it up to work all on one computer and just dump to a "dumb" storage drive, but it is really designed to work with a central server.

sliken 12y ago
Last I checked bacula doesn't do deduplication in any normal sense of the word. It allows you to run a base job and then back up diffs, that's a far cry from normal dedupe.
- gh02t 12y ago
  Oh, yeah you're right. I don't use that feature, so I didn't really know the limitations. But looking at it, base jobs, while useful, are definitely not true deduplication.
kbenson 12y ago
I've sampled a few, and I've set up and used Bacula. At the time (10 years ago now), it seemed way more complex than I needed (a lot of it seemed to be centered around backing up to tape, which was not our use case). We eventually started using BackupPC, which we were really happy with, except it didn't have a native client for backing up windows, so there was a little weirdness with shadow drives, locked filed, etc. What you got in return was an open source project, a great interface, extreme versatility (do you want to back up using rsync, reverse rsync, tar-piping over SSH, or some custom mechanism?), and extreme space savings (all backup files are hard links to specific file, across multiple backups and separate backed up systems) along with reduced network usage if using rsync led to some interesting use cases we couldn't have done otherwise. I've been out of that field for a while now through, so I'm not sure how much of that is common nowadays.

by gh02t 12y ago

sliken 12y ago

Last I checked bacula doesn't do deduplication in any normal sense of the word. It allows you to run a base job and then back up diffs, that's a far cry from normal dedupe.

gh02t 12y ago
Oh, yeah you're right. I don't use that feature, so I didn't really know the limitations. But looking at it, base jobs, while useful, are definitely not true deduplication.

kbenson 12y ago

I've sampled a few, and I've set up and used Bacula. At the time (10 years ago now), it seemed way more complex than I needed (a lot of it seemed to be centered around backing up to tape, which was not our use case). We eventually started using BackupPC, which we were really happy with, except it didn't have a native client for backing up windows, so there was a little weirdness with shadow drives, locked filed, etc. What you got in return was an open source project, a great interface, extreme versatility (do you want to back up using rsync, reverse rsync, tar-piping over SSH, or some custom mechanism?), and extreme space savings (all backup files are hard links to specific file, across multiple backups and separate backed up systems) along with reduced network usage if using rsync led to some interesting use cases we couldn't have done otherwise. I've been out of that field for a while now through, so I'm not sure how much of that is common nowadays.