On Sat, 9 Apr 2005 at 8:40am, Gavin Henry wrote

> How does http://www.bacula.org/ stack up against Amanda?
> 
I was actually looking at bacula recently, with an eye to moving to it.  I 
asked about it on the local LUG mailing list -- the thread starts here 
<https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/dulug/2005-March/016129.html>.  My 
issue is that I currently have 5.5TB of (90+% full) space, with a new 6TB 
server showing up on Monday.  My current library (a 2 drive, 19 slot AIT3 
model) is struggling to keep up.  I have to juggle DLEs a fair bit as 
usage patterns change.  Bacula natively supports tape spanning, as well as 
backing up ACLs.  It seemed like it was worth looking into to...

However, I pretty quickly decided against moving to it.  The main reason 
is that the scheduler seems, well, primitive.  Amanda's scheduler is so 
very nice, and (in general) does such a good job that I'm spoiled.  With 
bacula, the scheduling seems very much up to the admin, and achieving the 
sort of balance amanda does so effortlessly looks to be a nightmare.

I was also leery of losing the ability to recover data with nothing other 
than mt, dd, and tar.  I probably need to get over that issue even 
sticking with amanda and investigate the spanning patch (given tools like 
Knoppix with room to spare for new utilities), but it's just such a 
comforting feeling.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.  I looked, but didn't even come close to leaping.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University