Bacula alternative? [closed]

We currently run Bacula for our network but it seems really overly-complicated for what its doing.

Is there a good alternative to Bacula out there that anyone could recommend that runs on Linux and handles both Linux and Windows clients? Or is Bacula pretty much the best solution atm?

Solution 1:

Amanda/Zmanda may be an alternative to bacula, but it I'm guessing that you are looking for something other than an equivalent system.

The answer to your question requires... a more detailed question. ;-)

I'm going to guess that by saying overly-complicated, you are really looking for a less complicated solution. And, this would imply that your needs don't match your solution.

If you enumerate your needs, you can A) focus your own research starting somewhere like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software and B) expect more thorough answers to your question.

I've administered Legato and I've done some work with both Amanda and bacula. They are all essentially the same solution with differing implementation details. Do you need something more radically different? Maybe try a solution like Crashplan? This will require you to fill out your question even further to explore your comfort levels with proprietary formats and cloud services and their related security implications. In order to get something very different from traditional centralized network backup software, you are going to need to figure this out anyway.

In short, you need a list of requirements (when don't you?) and some way of evaluating risks and rewards. Multiply that by the power of Server Fault and you should have something you can take back to the team to look at.

Solution 2:

Bacula and Amanda are top choices for open source centralized data backup. Try installing bat(bacula administration tool) or bacula web gui for easier administration.

Solution 3:

You don't need to restart Bacula for every change. Just run a reload from the bconsole and it will reread the configuration. Of course you can make your config very dynamic. Bacula can look in directories for config files and merge them all together. We have different config files for each job. You can create a tool the make these config files. So it is actually very flexible. Bacula follows the UNIX principles, maybe you need to get used to that?