I am attempting to back up several RH servers and I am trying to find the easiest/safest way to accomplish this. Anyone have any suggestions?

Two popular open source solutions are Bacula and Amanda. The main difference between them is that Amanda overwrites each tape. It does not append data to tapes.

You can also look at Tapeware. This is not an open source product.

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I think the proper answer would depend a lot on how much data you have on each server and what the services running on the servers are.

For example, if I had a server that is is purposed as a mail server then I personally would only want a backup of the email and pertinent configuration (examples: mail.cf, hosts, aliases.db, etc) files. This could range from ~1GB to 100's of GB's. Another example would be if I had a nameserver. If that were the case I would only backup the /var/named (or /var/chroot/var/named) which would probably be less than 10MB.

Each of those examples I would have different methods to accomplish the backup. Once backed up though worse case scenario I reimage a server and copy the backed up files to the new server.

If you can be more specific then I think you will get all the ideas you need!

umm, there are many differences between them, and many of those differences I would think are more substantial.

edgesonlpr, read up a bit on them and see what matters for you. There is lots of documentation, and either one is available either from source or as package installs. For Amanda, check out http://amanda.zmanda.com/ and the user documentation at http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Main_Page. There is a quick start guide and a reference for setting up a quick test environment for disk based backup. You can see the reasons I like Amanda at http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2007...-about-amanda/. Those are still relevant, even though the post is slightly dated. There has been an enormous amount of development on Amanda in the last couple of years that make it even better.

I know less about Bacula, but I followed both lists for a couple of years before choosing Amanda, and I still keep an eye on Bacula. It is also popular, and its main site is http://www.bacula.org/en/.

Well, if you are like me, running a small desktop as a server at home, and don't have a tape backup setup, connect another hard disk, format it as whatever you prefer, and make cronjobs with mksquashfs of things you care about, or maybe even the whole filesystem if you are really paranoid. Me? I just make an ext3 image of things I need backed up and then gzip it and put it wherever. Hope this was helpful.

Please provide the list. I am sure it would help people to choose the solution that suits them best.

(emphasis added)

That's difficult. Depending on how you go about it, such a list could be very long. Also, if it were a "feature" list, then those change as developers work on the respective code bases.

My blog post (referenced previously) "Ten Things I Like About Amanda" gives a broad overview, including some things that would go on such a list.

There is also a table comparing major backup software at http://wiki.bacula.org/doku.php?id=comparisons. I don't know how recently it has been updated.

If I were to give a quick summary of the philosophical differences between the two (quick because I'm late leaving for work), I would say that (1) Amanda is built based on the Unix philosophy of putting together tools. It uses native tools (gnu tar, ufsdump for Solaris, dd, openssl, etc.) and builds the integration of those to achieve the backup. Bacula builds everything (and so has to reinvent and maintain the wheel many times). (2) Amanda has a small footprint on your system. Bacula implements numerous daemons that have to keep running, has a sql database running, a storage director, etc. But, (3) perhaps the most unique thing about Amanda and differs from all other backup software is its planner. You give Amanda a list of items (DLEs or Disk List Entries in Amanda) to be backed up and the cycle of days that you will be backing them up. Then Amanda adaptively plans the backups, distributing full backups of individual items over the dump cycle so as to distribute the load. The result is that there is no massive peak when everything has to get a full backup at the same time. You get a clean, even load on clients, network, storage devices, and the backup server over the course of the week or month. The Sysadmin also doesn't have to worry about balancing things when storage usage changes. Amanda adapts. In virtually all other backup software, it is up to the sysadmin to design the details of the backup strategy and to handle balancing; and, as the storage usage changes, the sysadmin has to be aware of it and adapt the details of the plan manually.

Anyway, I don't have time here to get into all the differences. I can answer more questions if needed later.

Do you mean backup data or whole machine backup?

If whole machine I used Ghost with the raw option (Windows version using UBCD4win) - when restoring to our new server we had to run grub again to fix some error, but it worked perfectly. This is documented on the web too so not too hard to get your head round.