On Oct 1, 2016, at 10:22 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:
On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:
I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.
Yeah. Amanda's a good solution. I use it with tape.
There are a couple advantages to this:
Amanda's been around for a very long time (in computer years). So, like Debian stable, the bugs tend to have been worked out.
Amanda does its backups using plain old standard *nix software, dump or tar. So if you have a really nasty data loss, you can restore from a backup without dealing with data in a format built by the backup program. It's not a trivial job, I'm told, but if you're really stuck...
The tapes aren't disks, and every backup is done to a different and simple storage device with few moving parts. (The reliability of a disk RAID1 reduces this advantage significantly.)
OK, there are disadvantages too: Amanda's not easy to configure, and tapes and tape drives are very expensive and very slow.
But I like the advantages more than the disadvantages. It does a really good and reliable job.