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target - Backup & restore tool that can be put on a PXE server so that a client can be booted via network and support IBM/HP blade machines

I hope that I ask the right question, there are allot of backup & restore tools so I little confused and I want to fit the backup & restore tool for blade HW ( to support network blade drivers )

In my company we have blade machine – as HS21 type .

On all blade machine we install red-hat Linux OS ( version 5.x and up ) ,

then we installed application on each Linux

So after we have complete machine with Linux + app on each server in the blade HW we intend to clone each of the blade servers ( disk clone )

We already have PXE server so disk cloning (backup / restore) will be via PXE server

  • backup & restore application must run on the PXE server - PXE server is linux machine
  • backup & restore USER INTERFACE must be from Linux machine side (IBM Blade HW)

There are allot of backup & restore tools as clonezilla or acronics

But what we need is the best Reliability tool

and its must be very friendly user interface GUI , and also free software

Please advice what our options ?

yael
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  • Unfortunately [product and service recommendations are off topic on all Stack Exchange sites](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/) -- the kind of information we can give you here will be obsolete very quickly. If you evaluate a few tools and can ask us specific questions about them ("How do I do X in tool Y?") we can give you better advice which may help with your ultimate choice... – voretaq7 Jul 26 '12 at 20:41

1 Answers1

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I guess there are 2 useful questions/answers to consider.

1) It very much depends on what you are backing-up your data to. (your storage)

If you have a tape library, then free and reliable solutions are amanda and bacula.
If you are backing up to the cloud, then solutions like duplicity with rackspace-cloudfiles are also good.

2) And also what you are backing-up from (which applications, or file types)

Databases like mysql, orable, postgresql, need to be integrated into the backup flow, to provide useful, recoverable backups.

Examples for tools to backup mysql are xtrabackup from percona, and mysql-zrm.

The Webmin configuration backup tools is surprisingly good for capturing application configurations into re-storable backups files, and it can also be configured using the web interface and scheduled.

Also in terms of web interfaces, webmin provides a plugin for bacula and backup manager, and can be used to create backups of configuratons.

Tom
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  • please advice how amanda/bacula can run on my PXE server ? and how to instsall them on my PXE server (linux) – yael Apr 24 '12 at 07:36
  • The main installation document for bacula is here - http://www.bacula.org/5.0.x-manuals/en/main/main/Installing_Bacula.html – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 07:45
  • I suspect that bacula is not going to be the right software for your requirement, as it provides reliability at the expense of simplicity. – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 07:46
  • what about amanda ? (http://www.zmanda.com/quick-backup-setup.html) – yael Apr 24 '12 at 07:55
  • its similar in that it is very reliable, but it doesn't have a good web interface. – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:12
  • about bacula ( I dont see any PXE setup there ? -:( – yael Apr 24 '12 at 08:16
  • maybe I am confused, you want to run the backup as pxe client app? so to backup you are going to reboot the blade to pxe and have it backup the offline blade disk over the network to the pxe server? – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:20
  • PXE server will send to blade unit the client so client will run from the blade via network (PXE) – yael Apr 24 '12 at 08:28
  • OK, well scrap all my previous answers then. It very much depends on your pxe client. What is the pxe software, is it altiris RDP/HP/deployment server? – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:30
  • let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3212/discussion-between-tom-h-and-yael) – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:31
  • also, the pxe client has a very poor GUI so not not sure about your USER INTERFACE requirement is possible at all. – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:33
  • but I think you are probably looking for `pxe backup systems` and there are lots of different packages. Mostly there are command line like [ghost4linux](http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/ghost4linux/index.html), acronis, or clonezilla like you mention. – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:35
  • redo backup/restore is another one - http://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/ – Tom Apr 24 '12 at 08:36