On 01/11/12 22:57, Jeff Siddall wrote:
> Not to bash tools like cpio, tar and mt, but one of the coolest pieces of
> software out there has to be BackupPC. Huge cheap magnetic disks combined with
> the compression and file pooling capabilities of BackupPC makes it hard for me
> to imagine going back to tapes.
>
> Just last week I restored an entire 1.5 GB LTSP client image from a backup
> made a few months ago, all in a matter of a few minutes with no digging for
> tapes.

I've been using BoxBackup for quite some time.  This is an online backup 
solution.  It might not be as fancy as Amanda or Bacula, but it is darn easy 
to setup and works quite well.  Most of my boxes are setup with "lazy backup", 
which basically means rolling backups based time stamps on the files.  All 
backups are encrypted on the client side too, before they are sent to the 
server.  This means you'll have to have the decryption key saved somewhere 
else safely to be able to do disaster recoveries.  But this is can be ideal 
for off-site storage where you might not trust the storage environment.

What I don't like about BoxBackup is that the project almost seems dead, even 
though some developement is happening.  And the command line tools can 
sometimes be a bit tricky to work with.  But when you find the right tool and 
the right commands, it seems to work very well.  There are also some issues 
with deleted files being cleaned up a bit too early and something about 
timestamps on directories, iirc.  The Windows client does not handle files 
over 2GB well, but those files can be restored on a Linux computer (provided 
you have the encryption key available)

If I get some more time, I'm planning to submit BoxBackup to Fedora (including 
EPEL) after I've cleaned up the .spec file a bit more (the one in the source 
tree is rather nasty, and definitely does not comply with current Fedora 
packaging rules).  But if someone is interested to give this a try and/or help 
out, get in touch and I'll provide a src.rpm for testing.

But I have to admit ... if Bacula would have been as easy to set up (including 
encryption) as BoxBackup, I would probably have been using Bacula instead - 
mostly because of the tools and it seems to be better developed.  Bacula can 
use file storage as well as tapes.  Another option for backup to hard drives 
is also to use iSCSI and export partitions or files as iSCSI tape volumes. 
I've not tested this yet, but if the docs is correct, it should even support 
mtx to "exchange tapes".


kind regards,

David Sommerseth