Re: [Bacula-users] Is Bacula and a LTO drive right for me?

Hello Florian,

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 3:40 PM, Florian Rist <frist AT fs.tum DOT de> wrote:

Hi,
I didn't have to take care of backups for quite a while, but now I'm
looking for a suitable solution to backup a small office.

A long time ago I used Amanda to backup a single server to DDS-2 tape.
This was in 1996 or so. The total volume to back up was about 2 GB.

Now I need to backup a bit more:

file server, OS X, 6 TB, growing 1 TB per year
web sever, Linux, 500 GB
10 OSX clients, 5 TB total (probably less)
10 Windows clients, 5 TB Total (probably less)
a few virtual machines running Windows and Linux, 1 TB total

The volume of daily new data is usually rather small, a few hundred MB
probably but can reach several gigabyte from time to time.

I was thinking about using Amanda gain, but somehow I'm more interested
int o Bacula right now, my previous Amanda experience is so minimal and
total outdated that it's no reason to stick to Amanda.

So, what do you think, is a small dedicated backup server, Bacula an a
LTO drive a feasible solution?

The most recent tape drives technology are LTO-6. The LTO-6 tapes have a native capacity of 2.5 TB and up to 6.25 TB of compressed data. Unfortunately it is really difficult to reach such amount of data in a tape. Maybe a 1.5:1 compression rate depending on your data. So you will need more than one tape for a full backup and this will need manual intervention for changing tapes. If this is not a problem for you Bacula and an LTO drive is a feasible solution. Otherwise you should propably think about a tape library for this work.

A few more questions:
I it possible to buffer incremental backups on a rather small hard disk
and write them to tape once a week or so?

Yes, You can have full/differential/incremental backups in a hard disk and then write once a week to tape. This is commonly known as disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backups. And probably you should think about a storage disk systems (there are some at little cost).

The Network is slow here, I'll not be able to reach the native write
speed of a LTO drive, is this a problem? I think I remember some issues
in this respect with the DDS drive, but that was a long time ago.

What do you mean about "slow Network"? Could you be more specific? Are your data go across wan links? There are lots of known cases with Bacula working across wan links with no problems.

Any recommendations on the server hardware? The budget is small
unfortunately.

Any other comments?

Thanks
Flo

Best regards,

Ana

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One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud 
Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications
Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights
Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight.
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