What's your preferred tool for backups?

--jeremy

Clonezilla. I love it, although I wouldn't really call it a backup tool. More a snapshot tool.

I have just always used rdiff-backup.

rsync, couldn't be easier. Other "real" back-up suites are too complicated. The more complicated a back-up solution is, the more opaque the mechanism, and I am afraid I pull my hair out when I actually have to perfrom a full restore.

jlinkels

A custom rsync script, it's in my sig. ;-)

I use full versioned backup with a local "server" replicating my repo, currently using Mercurial for all but a couple directories. It is really easy to sync across desktop and laptop, any operating system, and maintain double-updates, even just by myself

For enterprise class backup solution in mixed MS and *nix environment Bacula is my preferred solution. Note that setting such a solution up correctly will require some investment in actually reading the manual, analysis, capacity planning, and tuning, but once you've done your due diligence and rolled to production Bacula does it's thing with minimal hassle. Role based, encryption, d2d2t, etc. Bacula offers a comprehensive solution that is truly open source that is not just a crippled "community edition" teaser calculated to be conduit to costly full featured "enterprise edition". Amanda aficionados will cite database issues with Bacula but I've never had experienced such - but then I also allocate database hardware appropriate for the task at hand. And having the sql lookup capability is a godsend on networks with more than a few systems.

Otherwise if we're talking backup for a couple systems then dump gives me all I need.

Gotfw, a quesion about Bacula. I did RTFM, even twice. But when I came to the bare metal restor chapter I started to doubt. To me it seemed restore was easy if you have your complete Bacula setup and infrastructure running. But what happens if you just have a tape and a new server just coming in from Dell with RAID arrays and all? Have you ever done a bare metal restore, and how did it go?

jlinkels

rsync, so easy even I can do it.

Remastersys
which is only for debian/ubuntu but it is great and has many options

Rsync rocks! Especially if you backup to slow usb devices since only the changes are backed up.

tar

Amanda -- see Ten Things I Like About Amanda.

Of course, Amanda is network backup software, intended to coordinate the backup of a number of computers to a centralized backup server. Most of the items listed in the poll are not in the same class. They are intended as tools to be used in scripts, one-off backup events, or incorporated into other software. Amanda, for example, uses gnu-tar as a backup tool.

rsync is another of those basic tools that ends up getting using in lots of other scripts and backup software.

In the realm of just backing up your own user files, I might vote for rsync or one of its offshoots. But, forced to make a choice between basic tools and enterprise level network backup software, I vote for Amanda for all the reasons listed in the post quoted above.

Which is why I like amanda

Have done a couple of bare metal restore with amanda, including ones late in the evening on the central server for the entire office, when the Raid had 2 HD failures in half an hour .

So not only can you (relatively easily) do it, it's even doable when under (very) high pressure

Any docs on such a bare metal restore? User manual from amanda.org?

jlinkels