Blogger.com hates me. I mean, +1 for Bacula

Matt asked how Amanda worked for people, and whether they'd recommend anything else. I tried to leave a comment, but Blogger's CAPTCHA (god, I hate that acronym) never seems to work for me. So here goes. (Irony of a man w/an email-based comment system complaining about someone else's left as exercise f/t reader.)

Amanda: Nice, but: At my last job (2.5 years ago now), we started running into problems when backing up a 1TB RAID5 array...simple Promise disk array, nothing special or terribly fast. Amanda would take hours to do an estimate of the backups…which, since Amanda tries to pack tapes as full as it can, it does all the time. This got to be a huge pain, and we didn't find a solution to this problem before I left. (We were using GNU tar for Amanda; not sure if that had anything to do with it, and I can't remember what the alternatives were…maybe dump? Dunno.) Not sure what the current state is.

Bacula: +1 on the nice. Very, very good at my current job; absolutely no problems with it at all. And the documentation is enough to cry for, it's so complete and wonderful and thorough and accurate and well done. Clients for Unix, Windows, and Mac. Total filesystmes here are…uh…less than 1TB, definitely, although it's creeping up there. So the smaller size may have something to do with it.