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We have two sites, one linux (Ubuntu) based, the other windows based which we would like to connect permently over VPN (using openVPN).

We need to backup some files on a number of linux (Ubuntu) servers to the windows Server at a remote site.

I'm considering using Bacula. Does anyone else have any experience with this scenario?

I'd be greatful for any other helpful resources you could point me to.

Mr Shoubs
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5 Answers5

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I do not have any experience with Bacula, and for a reason. The Bacula guys themselves say that Bacula is sophisticated and does not suit everybody. However, if you know that Bacula is what you want, and have decided that other solutions (like good old Rsync) are not suitable, then go ahead and dive into it — they say they have the Windows Storage daemon packaged for you in the binary installer.

Quoting from the Bacula documentation:

[...] if you are new to Unix systems or do not have offsetting experience with a sophisticated backup package, the Bacula project does not recommend using Bacula as it is much more difficult to setup and use [...]

And in another section:

MS Windows Director and Storage daemon are available in the binary Client installer

That said, there are more free software solutions you might want to consider. Dirvish is one of them, and somebody apparently made it work on Windows, packaged it in an installer, and named it hardBackup. Haven't had any experience with that also, though, but I know that his copSSH and cwRsync work together and are great.

If you have any more questions, hit the comments. Good luck!

Amir
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  • Good answer thanx. I'm not worried about complexity. I'm a dev so shouldn't have any problems. I'll read some more about the other two. – Mr Shoubs Nov 26 '09 at 15:25
  • It would be interesting to see why they think it is diffacult to use though. Maybe they just mean theres a lot of config to do and you have to understand it's modularity first? – Mr Shoubs Nov 26 '09 at 15:27
  • Like I said, I have no experience with Bacula, but I guess you are right about just having to learn to config and understand it's modularity. The reason I looked away from it at the time was that it is tape-oriented, and who buys tape drives these days when hard drives are so cheap. – Amir Nov 26 '09 at 16:05
  • Indeed, however it does that that you can back up to HDD too. – Mr Shoubs Nov 26 '09 at 16:10
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I'm currently deploying Bacula on a network of Linux boxes and will be working on getting the Windows desktops going next. The only thing I can say as far as difficulty so far is there are a lot of configuration structures to get set up. There's a fairly extensive hierarchy of Jobs, JobDefs, Clients, FileSets, Schedules, Pools, Storage, etc that needs to be set up. If you're comfortable with technical documentation, textual config files and have some time to play around, the power you have in the end should be well worth it. There's a lot of reuse to be had once the structures are in place and working.

Something to consider for your setup is your VPN bandwidth. You can set up incremental backups which shouldn't strain things terribly, but the initial Full backup to get things primed could be painful. When it comes time to set up our other site, it's likely I will deploy a second Bacula Director instead of trying to do it over our limited upstream, but if you've got the bits to spare, the central management will be nice.

tmitchell
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Linux rsync is compatible with Windows deltacopy. I use this setup for file repication, but it's not a true backup solution, so it may not be what you are looking for. http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

matt
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AhsayOBM detects delta level file changes, and is a fully featured backup option designed for off site backup.

Crashplan is another option.

menko
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I would just use scp with a ssh server running on the windows server. rsync will also do a great job.

Recursion
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