What are the top backup software for Linux servers in a network environment/

Thanks

There are many, but your question is vague. Want to spend money, or free? What are you backing up, to what kind of media, connected how? How many clients? Retention? Bare-metal recovery or just file data? What??? Have you tried Google for anything? Bacula, Zmanda, Networker, Tivoli storage manager, and Avamar are several, both free and commercial.

Many of your other posts are along a similar vein, where the questions just aren't clear, or you don't post follow ups or answer questions.

Don't mean to be flippant, but in a server environment the top choices would be tar and rsync.

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Nor do I mean to be flippant, but, in a server environment, after a few servers, scripting your own tar and rsync starts getting pretty old. I spent a number of years writing my own backup scripts. You reach a point where you realize that it takes less effort to implement a real backup solution. That's when I switched to using Amanda. I still use tar and rsync for some situations, and I believe in protection in depth -- in other words multiple types of backup or similar protections. So, I may have raidz2, zfs snapshots, rsync, and tape backups with Amanda all running on the same server, as well as using gtar to send the Amanda configuration and indexes across the network to another server. But, I no longer try to script all my own network backups to tape for all of my servers. That just gets to be nuts after a while.

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Amen to that. Tar and rsync are fine for one or two servers that don't have anything critical on them, and on servers with few users. Anything more, and you need a serious backup solution that handles versioning, tape/media rotation, etc., etc....all the things that manual backups can't provide, unless you want to be a 24/7 tape robot that eats.

Amanda and Bacula are popular open source products.

Amanda is a popular one, but it looks like it takes some commitment to configure. I looked at it for our setup and was just overwhelmed, but I'm also not a senior Linux person either . Tar and rsync are good basic options, but I think it's just as important to make sure your stuff is backed up in multiple spots, i.e. not on-site only, as it is to be backing up in the first place, so I'm a big fan of vaulting solutions for backing up. No tape, no rotation, set it and forget it essentially, plus you have a disaster recovery scenario of sorts. It's not free though, and as TB0ne said, it really depends on how much you want to spend, if anything.

It takes a bit of work to set up any serious piece of software. Look at the Bacula manual. It's Huge.

Anyway, if you want a quick start for Amanda, what I used (a few years back) was http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Quick_start_%28old%29. At the top of that there is now a reference to "Getting Started with Amanda". Also, a Google search of "amanda backup quick start" turns up some platform and version specific examples that people have posted on forums or blogged about.

The payoff is that you end up with a real backup solution that just keeps on working. I have to do very little to maintain my several Amanda installations. I periodically review what is being backed up, I periodically have to cycle tapes through the tape library, and I do a quick scan of the reports Amanda generates to make sure there are no errors I have to attend to. When I had a tape drive failure a couple of years ago, Amanda automatically fell back to doing incrementals only and keeping them on the holding disk. When the drive was repaired, Amanda automatically proceeded to flush the holding disk to tape and went back to catching up on full backups. If I had still been doing my own scripts, I would have had to scramble to script an interim solution or more likely lost a few days of backup protection, since I was caught up in dealing with the failed tape drive.

I would also recommend BackupPC.
It uses symlinks, so that backups don't take too much space. On beneath of it there is rsync with it's advantages (sending deltas of the files).
It also has a nice WebUI.

BackupPC is very good but -as its name says- it is used to backup PC to server.
For server's contents backup I think best is using combination of tar / rsync or Bacula - depending on needs.
If you want to pay, you can also check Arkeia Network Backup (http://www.arkeia.com)

Thank you guys for the information. I am going to try Amanda/rsycn for servers and BackupPC for PC's.