Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a backup solution. I've been using a custom python script to backup several servers, local and offsite (linux and windows). It's working OK. I then burn the backups to DVDs and store them in a locker in the nearby bank.

But now it's getting ridiculous. I'm receiving something like 300GB to 500GB of backups per month. That I have to burn to DVD-R.

Software wise I'm moving to Bacula with a strong MySQL backend. Now that should take care of everything and be easier to documents.

It's on the hardware side that I'm not too sure.

1. Dual layer DVDs don't hold enough data
2. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD aren't out yet and it's too soon to adopt in a production environment.
3. Tape drive? I don't have any experience with them, are people getting rid of them, or are people still buying them?
4. NAS/SAN? Is the price worth it? I know that restores are super fast compare to other solutions, but on the other hand I can't store it in the bank. What if we get rob/fire/disaster?

Anyway, I'm just looking for opinions, experiences, anything that can help me take a wise decision.

thanks


Yanik

The general movement is disk backups which are later duplicated to tape for offsite storage.

In most large shops (including this one) the existing methodology is simply to use something like NetBackup or Legato with a tape library (robot) that has 2 or more drives and multiple slots. With these tools you can backup directly to tape (over SAN or via network). NetBackup has a vaulting utility to duplicate tapes for offsite storage (so you can have recent backups on site for quick restores and duplicates off site for DR/Auditing/Reporting purposes later).

What is happening now is that a lot of people are moving to doing snapshots or data deduplication onto NAS to the onsite copies are on disk (and therefore faster) then doing the duplication from the NAS to tape for offsite.

It depends a lot on how much you want to spend. I don't have experience with Bacula. In mixed environments (Unix/Linux/Windows) things like NetBackup are good because they typically have clients for many different platforms and a master server from which to manage all the backups.

Thanks for sharing,

Bacula is an open source server/client backup application. The server and client is available for windows and linux/unix. I am using a linux server and mixed windows/linux clients.