alternate VERITAS Replication Exec
 

dear respected sir/gurus

we are using over windows 2003 symantec/vertias product VERITAS Replication Exec. it work only on windows 2003/2000 enviornment. we do have branches that are connected over vpn.

so everyday as per schedule the flat data like word,excel,pdf,images used to come to head office on our backup machine.

can you suggest and advised the alternate of this using linux enviornment. what are possible software i can use it?

kind regards
salim

Hello,

Have a look at Amanda. It's a pretty good and professional Open Source Backup program.

Kind regards,

Eric

For Windows backup hosts:

Amanda is very very difficult to use if you are not backing up to a tape device.
If you are backing up to disk rather than tape, I heavily recommend Bacula instead.

For linux backup hosts:

Just use rsync/rsnapshot

umm, that's way wrong or seriously out of date information. Amanda is very commonly used for backup to disk as well as backup to cloud systems such as Amazon S3. While I have several installations using Tape libraries with Amanda, many/most of the posts I see on the Amanda user's list or the Zmanda forums these days relate to implementations that are doing backup to disk. Personally, I think Amanda is the easier of the two to get started with. Of course, it should be said that any enterprise capable backup system is going to be somewhat complex in its configuration possibilities. For Amanda, the quick start on the wiki is the best guide to diving in and doing it (click on quick start part way down in the main Amanda wiki page http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Main_Page). If you want a number of reasons for liking Amanda, see http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2007...-about-amanda/. That's a little on the old side now, but still applicable.

The problem is simply that Amanda was designed for tapes and then bashed into shape for disk. Bacula came along later assuming that disk was a likely candidate from the start.

Excuse me, but if you followed Amanda development over the last few years, a tremendous amount of work has gone into it, including a complete rewriting of API's. With the release of 2.6 in 2008, the framework had been rewritten in perl to allow quicker development, with the core, speed critical elements remaining in C. Because it is written as a planning framework that calls existing system utilities, it is ideal to adapt to whatever tools you want to use for backup. That's why it was relatively straightforward to adapt it to backing up to cloud storage such as Amazon S3 as well as being containerized so that it could be easily deployed in cloud computing. They were also one of the very few open source projects that responded by fixing every single vulnerability revealed by source code audits and receiving a software security certification from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

You're completely missing the boat by leveling 5 or 10 year old criticisms against a product that has such a high level of ongoing and thoughtful development. If you tried some 10 year old criticism against Bacula, it would be "Bacu-what?" Clearly, you have to look at both products in current terms as they exist now.

Ok. You already have heard a lot about amanda and bacula. These two are the most common backup solutions for enterprise grade but then you can also look into NetVault Backup. It is available for free download for Linux but is a paid software.

My criticism is current, do not take it personally.

Amanda's disk storage is via the use of virtual tape devices and virtual tapes. This is necessary because Amanda only understands tapes. For many users, especially those who have never worked in a commercial environment, tapes are a complete unknown. Having then to understand disk backing storage as location that must be split into virtual tape devices, each with a relevant label etc. is simply confusing.

Bacula's storage is similar, but easier to understand. You could choose one large volume or multiple smaller volumes to cycle or whatever you need to and from the administrator's point of view it makes a reasonable amount of sense.

I make no criticism of Amanda's ability to do its job. It is a robust and stable way to do backups to many types of media.

I simply mean to suggest that for those unfamiliar with tape technologies or who are new to complex backup systems and who are looking to backup only to disk, Bacula is an easier option, while producing the same quality of result as Amanda would.

So, now you are claiming that it is just the use of the name "virtual tape" that is so terribly confusing that a linux user implementing backups simply isn't going to be able to understand what we are talking about?

The thing is that Bacula is actually more complicated, and there are frequent references to the steep learning curve, even on the Bacula users list. You have to implement multiple server daemons that have to be up and running and communicating with one another. They require a backend of an SQL database, and oftentimes the performance tuning involved in storing many millions of records. They recommend PostgreSQL which requires more out of the box tuning to get running right. If one of the daemons stops, your backups don't run, so people implement things like nagios plugins to watch Bacula and tell them if, at any time, it is not running (even when backups aren't running). There are also frequent questions on the Bacuala list from users trying to figure out the confusing topic of volumes, pools and labels. Now, all of that is within the capabilities of a competent sysadmin, but, if we're talking about someone who is easily confused by the use of the words "virtual tape", I wouldn't expect it to be easy.

Any serious enterprise piece of software is going to have its own terminology with its own definitions to describe what it does and how it works. Any sysadmin who tries to implement such software has to read the documentation and understand the terminology. It's pretty simple in the case of "virtual tape" -- it's disk space used to store backup data. It is identified by writing a label into it, just as a tape or a Bacula volume (which might be a tape) has a label written into it for identification.

(Edit: oops. network glitch on my home connection resulted in double posting. scratched this one. maybe someone with the power to do so could just delete this.)

dear all,

no quarrel cool down all, i highly appreciated the prompt fastest response and support me such great way.

i try to learn all from you and make practise

thanks and highly appreciated

kind regards
salim