[BBLISA] backups

[John Stoffel]

>>>>> "Ryan" == Ryan Pugatch <rpug at linux.com> writes:

Ryan> On 12/14/2010 03:38 PM, John Stoffel wrote:
>> What are your needs?  That would help us give you suggestions.
>> Disk2disk?  D2T?  What?

Ryan> disk to disk to offsite disk.

Do you have money to spend?  How much data?

Ryan> getting offsite via 100Mbit or 1GigE

Yeah, you have money.  :]  Though I bet you're not going too far
offsite with your setup at those prices.  

I personally still like Legato/EMC networker, but I haven't used it
for years.  The CLI tools are very well done so you can easily script
up reports or do stuff by hand.  And the browsing for restores is
excellent, best I've ever used out of:  Veritas NetBackup 5.x, Legato
Networker 4.x & 5.x, Bacula, Commvault 7.x and 8.x.

The big thing to remember is that no one cares about backups, they
only care about restores.  So a tool which makes restores easy and
painless is the best.

Also, if you are using Netapp storage, it might be worth it to
snapmirror across your WAN link and then backup to disk remotely.  Not
cheap I admit, but certainly lets you keep your DR and restore options
lightning fast.

CommVault will do the D2D2D without a problem, but I'm not really
enamored of how they do things.  They have this Java client to do any
and all changes and it's just not nice at times.  They have an
interesting mindset (and they've been around for ages and ages, spun
off from AT&T) and it does work.  It's just... painful to wrap you
head around.

Bacula is open source and fairly easy to setup, but... the restore
process is out of the 80s, and just not friendly.  You can buy
professional support, and maybe they have better tools on that side of
things.  I do use it at home, and it has saved my bacon, but it's not
what I think it should be.

Amanda.  Haven't used it for years and years.  It might now be called
zmanad or something.  You might want ot check it out.

Veritas Netbackup.  I didn't like it when I used it, but I can't say I
used it in anger at all.  And it was over six years ago, so god knows
what's changed.

Are you looking for backup a single large system?  A bunch of smaller
stuff?  Money to burn?  Willingness to go opensource?  

John