Backup Application of the Year
 

What's your preferred tool for backups?

--jeremy

My corporation bought "Arkeia" and I find that it is VERY easy and expandable. I like it better than anything listed here.

Ohhhh You forgot g4l, Ghost for Linux.
I will not vote until it is added.

G4L has been added.

--jeremy

Thanks !
Voted for G4L. Easy, fast, reliable, useful features added regularly.
Successful where some others failed miserably. I enjoy this tool.

Well, this is tough. rsync, rsnapshot, tar and cp commands put into a shell script for customized backups. I dont know what to vote for. rsync? rsnapshot? tar? cpio? Ummmm....okay, its rsync.

I always have a little difficulty with this particular category. I use several of these regularly, depending on the situation. I have scripts that do a find and pipe it to cpio. I have scripts that tar up a directory and scp it to another server. I have scripts that rsync directories between servers. I use ufsdump for root disk server recovery. And I use Amanda for backup of data on all my servers across the network in several different departments.

I think the category should be broken into at least two. One would be basic tools like cpio, tar, dump, or rsync. Those are things you use from the command line or incorporate into some kind of script or higher level application. The other category would be applications that either build from those or from scratch to achieve a more integrated backup functionality -- intended to run regularly, tracking schedule and previous results, using a configuration file, maintaining sequences of full and incremental backups, handling multiple partitions, drives, machines, etc. I would also be inclined to separate out disk imaging applications from backup applications.

I have found AMANDA to be extremely reliable and flexible. The community support is great as well!

hey guys whatsup with the FSarchiver tool?

i used it to backup my ntfs.can you add it please?

FSArchiver has been added.

--jeremy

thanks a lot Jeremy .

rsync was just a fancy cp tool, cpio is the time tested winner

dar is my winner, use it for years now (at home).
Please somebody make a good gtk frontend for it.

luckybackup - a front end to rsync.

http://luckybackup.sourceforge.net/

Clonezilla

I've been very happy with rsnapshot.

I'll take a look at G4L for sure (didn't know about it)
Rsnapshot is what I currently use for certain large backups. However, my personal .*rc files are mostly handled by version control programs. i.e., git, mercurial.

I like Luckybackup which is a frontend for rsync. I've been pleased with the ease of use and performance for backups and sync.

+1 ;)

my vote goes for tar, simple and good........

Dropbox!

What's your preferred tool for backups?

Well it should be preferred tools for backups. ;)

I use rsnapshot for regular backups, and it uses rsync.

I use rsync for a few special purpose backups.

I use Clonezilla for image backups and occasionally use dd.

I also use tar to put data to tape.

I find FSArchiver a very useful tool.

I voted for rsnapshot, as it is the meat of my backup plan and running on my backup server. Next backup in less than an hour.

I use Simple Backup on my Notebook. It just does it. Very Simple. Very Robust. Does exactly what I want: logarithmic purging is just great!
Can you add it?

Bacula
 

I say Bacula, only because it reminds me of a 70s blackSploitation film. I actually use my own script for this. It's written in Sh.

I voted for DAR, but in reality I use the excellent DAR-wrapper SaraB. I'm happy with it's ease of use and performance both at work and home, where it gives me differential and incremental backups. And yes, I have been successfully restoring information from the backups, in production.

Anyone looking for a MySQL backup solution with minimal impact on database uptime may want to take a gander at Percona XtrBackup. I use it wherever I manage a MySQL database.

Hope this helped somebody

rsync and tar.
Woted for rsync.

I feel your pain...
 

I chose Bacula. I've embraced this as a scalable solution right on up through the enterprise.

But the thing is, I hardly EVER restore anything from that.

I need my stuff fast. And my clients need it even faster. My basic rule of thumb is such:

1.) When in the Enterprise, implement whatever the brass wants, make it pretty, and make them feel like they actually deserve their jobs (Even though they reallydon't).

2. Seriously folks ;) When someone actually comes and needs a particular item, do you really fire up that clunky old Amanda, Veritas, or BackupExpress?

No. You don't. You go and get the stuff the client needs lickety split coz you're a savvy sysadmin and without telling anyone, you also implemented a solution that allows you to go and get all the goodies you need quickly, and w/o any fuss!

And that solution was implemented w/rsync, tar, dump, rsnapshot, cpio, and cp.

Really, sittin' there on that big ole engine is kewl and makes the pencil pushers happy, but thirty year old solutions are still the ones that get their stuff back to 'em when they need it quick!

:)

.

Actually, yes; and, Amanda is not clunky.

For a few things that are particularly important, and that end users tend to screw up frequently, yes, I do have really fast local disk copies going back a week. However, that doesn't cut it for a general solution. If some generic faculty member comes to me and has lost some file from last semester, and hasn't had a copy recently, I can go to amrecover and have it back pretty quickly. That's what the tape library and multi-month cycle of backup tapes is for. And Amanda handles it all flawlessly with very little attention from me since I set it up. I just periodically review reports to make sure things are continuing to work properly.

My guess would be that you've nver been bitten by tar version incompatibility issues. There I was, needing to restore something from a couple/few years back, while unbeknown to me, the version of tar on my present systems was unable to untar backups from the "olden days". Go figure?!

I like Bacula. The SQL integration allows you to be pretty effective when it comes to restoring specific files from specific dates. Or perhaps a range of dates. Yeah, if you need to really turn back time on the way back machine, you may have to make a restore from offsite archives. In my experience, however, in such instances, folks are generally pretty ecstatic that you were able to do so.

Choogendyk and I had some pretty good exchanges regarding Amanda and Bacula last year. Rather than duplicate them here, I point interested parties to the 2009 Backup App of the Year poll.

More recently, I took a quick peek at Luckbackup. Looks nice for SOHO use but for anything more, I'd opt for enterprise grade solution such as Amanda or Bacula.

In this day of "disk space is cheap" and increasing tendency to store more and more on large arrays rather than tape, I recently had someone point out a benefit to tape that I'd overlooked - tape is a "greener" solution. Drive based systems use a lot more energy, especially to just sit there idle most of the time. I'm surprised the big tape and autochanger vendors haven't been pushing this aspect more - or at least not the ones I've interacted with as of late.

Bacula got my vote again this year :)
 

Actually, after coming to terms with such an incident, I worked up a quick kludge w/an old LiveCd once.

But yes, it took me completely by surprise!


Me too :) You can read my glowing review of Bacula at sourceforge - it's been on the front page of the reviews for some time now ;)

Bacula got my vote this year again too :)

No Offense to Amanda though (Well, perhaps a little prejudicial dismissal).

Hey thanks! I'll take a look at that. Always looking for emerging technologies and solutions :)

Kindest regards,

If btrfsctl were on that poll I would almost certainly vote for it. But no, it isn't.

NetVault Backup ;)

missing option
 

A great option that is missing: a custom script.

Clonezilla.

Toucan. It's from PortableApps.com.

you forgot mintbackup and backintime

Back In Time has been added.

--jeremy

star - like tar but with acl capabilities and mucho++ options

its hard to rate server and home backup products in one thread, but im really suprised with dropbox as a backup for files at home and some at work... its unbelievably easy to use, you dont have to do anything, just install and setup youre account and its working, i love that it backs up a new version of the file every time you save a file in the "box"

keep

how about good 'ol dd ;)

Any chance of Toucan being added for next years poll then?

I did not find Toucan installer for Linux, only windows. And if that is true I am not sure it will be lister here.

Hey,

I know this is late, but I just registered on this site

I see people have voted clonezilla highly, but I am surprised. Although I agree clonezilla is a terrific tool for imaging the drives or partitions on the same machine or on a remote machine, you need to shutdown your system always and to me I don't think you can afford taking your servers down to do full disk or partition image.

I would have voted for Amanda. It works quite nicely with virtual tapes as well on multiple platforms such as linux/solaris..etc.

If I was allowed to vote 2 times, then BackupPC would have been other choice, it has a user friendly web interface..