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Distribution: Solaris 9 & 10, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Server
Posts: 1,197
Rep:
You'll find links to a number of items in http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup. What you choose should depend on the specifics of your installation and your backup needs. I presume since you were looking at Bacula, you are interested in network backup of a number of computers. For that, I would choose Amanda. Look through some of the bookmarks above and then work through the Amanda Quick Start on their wiki.
One things that is different about Amanda (and which I really like) is it's planner, which manages the backup cycle. Rather than telling Amanda you want full backups on weekends and incrementals through the week, you set up what things you want backed up, the length of your backup cycle, how many runs, and so on. Then Amanda manages when to do full and incremental backups. It intermixes them, with full backups of all the different entries distributed across the backup cycle. The result is that your usage of resources is smoothed out. You get an even distribution of tape usage over the backup cycle (say, a week), even demand on network and server resources over the week, etc. There's no huge peak followed by days of very little usage. It also automatically adapts as your disk usage changes.
Distribution: Solaris 9 & 10, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Server
Posts: 1,197
Rep:
Tell us a bit more about your backup needs. Then we might be able to give better advice. What is it that you are trying to back up? One personal computer? A network of computers? Home? Work? Volume of data? Backup to disk? To tape? Image backups? What are your objectives? What is your experience level?
If you are doing simple backups I would suggest using rsync as you can do a snapshot style backup which can be fast. If not you could always use tar command and just use a script that will
delete week 2
move week 1 to week 2
move ...
I think you get the idea. For a step ahead you can even have the script check of an existing file in that folder so that it doesn't perform the work if not needed.
Just a suggestion though. I have not used anything else for backups on linux machines so I can't really suggest anything else.
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