Hey Dan,
Thanks for pointing out Bacula.
It appears to be a complete backup solution that scales easily and
provides features that would be very useful to a backup administrator of a
network.
After some reading, I have a question about disaster recovery with Bacula.
I have not read every section of the documentation so please forgive any
confusion on my part (but feel free to correct me).
Bare Metal Recovery requirements:
1) functional empty HD (new one since the old one died for example)
working in the same functional system that the backups were performed on.
2) A custom Bacula rescue CD (cool) built from the system before the HD
crash.
3) A fully configured Bacula Director, Catalog, and Storage daemon running
on another machine on your local network.
4) A full Bacula backup of your system
3) has me concerned for my use case. That would require a second
system running some Bacula servers. I was hoping to not have to do this.
I do have 2 Linux systems so I could have each one running Bacula
Director, Catalog, and Storage daemon. Then if one server dies, the other
one could serve this purpose?
Am I correct is assuming that 4) does not contain enough information
that it coupled with the custom Bacula rescue CD is not sufficient to
recover a failed HD? There is additional information/software required
and that is where 3) comes in?
3) might not seem like a big deal and it certainly wouldn't for
someone managing a big network but for a home user with my horrible luck
with HD drives, I can confirm that Murphy's law applies and my Bacula
Director, Catalog, and Storage Linux box will be the one that has the HD
failure. Just like my linux server without the backup solution is the one
that dies :)
Considering that you and Bart don't mind rebuilding systems, I'm assuming
that restoring the server would not be a big deal for you. I was hoping
to avoid having to rebuild/reconfigure a system before I recover the image
file. Seems a bit like a "Chicken/Egg" problem. You have to have a
working Bacula server before recovering a Bacula server? I could be way
out to lunch here so please keep in mind that I think that Bacula looks
like an awesome product for large networks (even large home networks) but
I'm wondering if it handles my simple use case well.
The FAQ indicates the Bacula is a network backup and restore program and I
think that is exactly what it is. I don't think that it is unreasonable
to expect a working Bacula server running on that network to handle the
recovery of client machines on that network. But that requirement may not
scale down to my needs. I concede that I didn't list a requirement
suggesting that I'd like to avoid requiring a second Linux system to
recover from the image.
Thank you very much for pointing out Bacula to me,
Dennis
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Dan Langille wrote:
On 26 Feb 2007 at 15:31, dman [ at ] lanhouse [ dot ] ca wrote:
I think someone a while back discussed rsync-snapshot so I'm going to look
it up but I thought I would ask what people use for back-ups.
I use, advocate, and contribute to Bacula <http://www.bacula.org/>
Ideally I'd like something that offers the following:
- schedules back-ups (otherwise I'll forget) while the system is running
normally
Check...
- each back-up creates an exact copy of the drive as a mountable image
file
I think you can backup the device, but I wouldn't do that myself.
- a configurable number of back-ups are kept and then the oldest is
overwritten
- command line interface (the servers I run don't have X)
- a recovery live CD for disaster recovery where an image can be
restored to a new drive and then that new drive can be booted.
Bacula has all those.
Is there a tool out there offering these features that someone on the list
has used (restored with). I'll start poking around but I thought I would
get someone's personal recommendation before I start trying things.
You got mine.