*scottstuff*

Bacula

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 06 Aug 2004 03:38:22 GMT

Backups suck. They always have, they always will, it’s just the nature of the beast. The big problem is that open-source backup solutions tend to suck really bad, and decent commercial solutions obey Joel’s pricing law, where no enterprise software costs between $3,000 and $100,000. At Internap, we paid well over $100k to Legato for their buggy, inflexible backup software, and we paid a similar amount of money for backup hardware. That’s what it took to do good backups of several hundred machines per night. On a smaller scale, people seem to have decent luck with Arkeia, but I’m not all that convinced that it’s much cheaper then Legato or Veritas once you pile on dozens of clients.

I’ve wanted a decent open-source solution for years. In ‘97 or so, I used Amanda for a while, but it had a kind of bizarre approach to tapes, weird security needs, and it didn’t scale very well. It still seems to be under some sort of active development, but I was using version 2.4.0 in the late ’90s, and the current release is 2.4.4p3; draw your own conclusions. I’ve been spending around one afternoon per year since then looking for something free that can handle a couple dozen mixed Linux and Windows systems, and can back up to a mix of tape and disk, and I’ve come away empty-handed every time.

Until today. Somehow, Bacula slipped past me without my noticing it. Besides the catchy name and motto (“It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers”), it seems to have the features that I’m looking for. It understands tape changers as well as filesystem backups. It’s network based with clients for Windows and Unix (and sort of OS X). It looks like it does an okay job at backup parallelism. It doesn’t have plugins for hot backups of popular databases, but most of the time, it’s easier to dump the database to a file and then back up the file, at least when you’re dealing with smallish databases.

It’s currently at version 1.34, although Debian seems stuck at 1.32f4 for some reason. I’ll be doing some testing tonight at home, since I’ve been without a comprehensive backup solution for years, but I’m feeling pretty good about this.

Having said that, it still lacks a few things that I’d consider rather useful:

• It can’t migrate backups between storage devices. No staging from disk to tape, for instance.
• It doesn’t do anything with optical disks. I’ve had good luck with doing full backups of important data to CDs or DVDs; it’d be nice to integrate that into one central backup system. This is better for smaller-scale setups, though.
• It can’t stripe a single backup across multiple drives.
• It’s not clear if it can interleave backups onto a single tape. When you’re backing up slow hosts over a big network, this can be critical. For LAN usage with cheap tape drives, it’s less critical.

They maintain a to-do list online. I haven’t really looked into their security history; there are a couple worrisome comments about sscanf in their to-do list, but it can’t be any worse then Legato Networker–it had holes that you could drive a bus through along with a few really fun failure modes. We triggered a great DDoS on ourselves one night in 2000 with every single backup client in the company sending 64-byte UDP packets to our backup server as fast as they could transmit them. We really loved them for that.

Update (8/6/2004): I let it rip last night. First, its UI needs work. Most configuration is done via text files, which is okay, but monitoring and management can be done via either a bad CLI without command-completion, or via a bad GUI which is basically just the CLI in a window with a scrollbar. Windows backups don’t include open files *or* the registry. Mac backups don’t include resource forks, but I knew that going into it. Finally, I’m not getting any email notification of success or failure, but that might be a mail problem on my backup server. All in all, it’s still better then most of the free solutions that I’ve looked at, but still not 100% there. It’s usable if you only care about Unix systems and you’re willing to spend a bit of time learning and scripting. It’s not usable if you’re looking for an out-of-the-box system that’ll work with Windows.

A friend suggested that I look at Box Backup. It doesn’t do tapes at all, which is a bit of a shortcoming in my mind, but it looks like it might be better for pure-Unix backups. On the other hand, it’s designed to do continuous backups, not nightly snapshots, which is probably a better design, if you can handle the load.

I should really write the backup strategy guide that I keep meaning to write. Leave a comment if you’re interested.